Why Casablanca's ‘American Landfill’ Keeps Growing

CASABLANCA—Two flags ripple over a landfill. Underneath these Moroccan banners stands Mira Mribih’s childhood home: a house that withstood the end of French rule in Morocco in the 1950s, the reign of three kings and, eventually, the disappearance of green pastures and Mribih’s village as garbage took over. Her neighborhood was consumed by the 40 million tons of trash known to locals as the “American landfill.” Here, upwards of 900 Moroccans sift through trash in search of plastic, copper, and anything else that can be sold while 14,000 cattle graze on the rotting waste.

The landfill earned its nickname while Ecomed, a Moroccan branch of the American environmental engineering groups Edgeboro International Inc. and Global Environmental Sustainability Inc., was running the aging landfill. Beginning in 2008, Ecomed was in charge of burying the garbage that Casablanca’s 3-million-plus residents discard daily at the site where the primary form of control is a crumbling cement wall.