"Some 4,000 people, mostly Irish, inhabit this slum... Heaps of refuse, offal and sickening filth are everywhere interspersed with pools of stagnant liquid.
Charles Dickens Our Mutual Friendd (1864-5) thelstory stofy of "the golden dustman", Mr Boffin, who has amassed a great fortune from the heaps of refuse that now ring London's smarter residential areas.
A black sofa pokes up from its murky waters; a landfill decorates its western bank; and beside another heap of refuse, a stray bra hangs lazily from the branch of a tree, lending a comic touch to the bleak scene.
Large heaps of domestic refuse spill across narrow streets, causing traffic delays, while the dumping of garbage along streambeds constitutes a major health hazard and has contributed to the floods that have often plagued Ibadan, Lagos, and other cities during the rainy season.
In one example, populations of bent grass can be found growing on heaps of mining refuse heavily contaminated with metals such as lead and copper.
They said two groups of about 40 attackers went on the rampage, leaving a trail of dead and dying, some with their throats slit, others disembowelled, mutilated or burned alive, horrors that have become commonplace in Algeria's civil war.Bentahla, just south of Algiers, is a bleak zone of dusty streets, meagre houses, heaps of rotting refuse and thousands of despairing families.
But heaps of garbage litter the landscape.
CAREFULLY stepping round another heap of fetid refuse in Sodom and Gomorrah, it is easy to despair of Africa's future.
We pass black boot prints tarred with waste oil and a great heap of wharfish refuse, tangles of long-discarded fishing nets, thick manila hawsers.
In another show, a bag lady who has assembled herself out of a heap of miniature refuse peers into the puppeteer's own mouth in search of new objects".
Heaps of rotting uncollected garbage are everywhere.
