Bogota is edging toward a sanitation crisis that local officials have been warning about for months. The capital now produces more than 5,600 tons of nonrecyclable waste every day, according to city waste-management authorities, and that volume has grown steadily as population and consumption patterns expand. Yet the city’s capacity to collect, transport, and dispose of that waste has not kept pace. Infrastructure has barely expanded in years, and the system is visibly straining. This is one of Colombia’s worst garbage crisis still to come.
As a result, many neighborhoods increasingly experience irregular or delayed trash pickup, with garbage piling up on sidewalks, in parks, and at bus stops, particularly in outer districts.
These gaps have contributed to a surge in illegal dumping sites, known as “critical points.” Local sanitation officials admit that hundreds of these points remain active, requiring constant emergency attention. Beyond their visual impact, they pose serious environmental and public-health hazards. Accumulated waste near homes and schools attracts pests, contaminates water sources, and produces foul odors that erode quality of life. What began as a matter of urban cleanliness has evolved into a deeper issue of environmental justice and health protection.
Doña Juana landfill: capacity under pressure
The growing crisis converges around a single, increasingly fragile node: the Doña Juana landfill, the only major disposal site serving Bogota and several nearby municipalities. As pressure on the landfill mounts and its remaining capacity shrinks, the central question becomes unavoidable: How much longer can Doña Juana sustain Bogotas waste without triggering a full-scale emergency?
According to official data, Doña Juana spans roughly 623 hectares and has been Bogota’s primary landfill since 1988. It receives waste from all localities within the capital as well as surrounding municipalities in Cundinamarca. Its current operating section, known as Fase II of the Parque de Innovacion Doña Juana (PIDJ), was authorized with an original capacity of 14.7 million cubic meters under its environmental license. By early 2025, less than 20% of that licensed volume remained, equivalent to 2.5 to 3.2 million tons of remaining capacity according to UAESP technical reports from January and April 2025. In other words, the landfill is already 80% to 85% full.
To delay its exhaustion, operators have used disposal areas outside the original licensed polygon, an emergency measure that has extended the landfill’s life but comes with significant technical and environmental challenges. Meanwhile, daily inflow continues to grow. In recent reports, Doña Juana has received between 6,500 and 6,750 tons of waste per day, the equivalent of dumping the contents of two to three Olympic-size swimming pools every 24 hours.
Doña Juana was originally designed for a 25-year lifespan, meaning it should have reached capacity around 2013. Its continued operation relies on repeated expansions and the vertical layering of waste on top of older cells, practices that increase engineering complexity, reduce stability, and heighten environmental risks.
The city acknowledges that this massive accumulation of waste expands the production of leachate, the polluted liquid that percolates through garbage, and increases methane emissions. While the landfill operates a biogas plant that captures some methane to generate electricity, the environmental burden remains immense.
Monthly disposal sometimes exceeds 186,000 tons, and millions of cubic meters of leachate must be treated, a logistical and ecological challenge of enormous scale. Authorities warn that if waste generation continues at current levels, Doña Juana could reach full capacity between 2025 and 2026, even with expanded disposal areas. The landfill is no longer a long-term solution; it is a vulnerable linchpin, and its failure would leave Bogota without an authorized disposal site.
The impact on collection and public health
The saturation of Doña Juana reverberates across the entire waste-collection system. When landfill capacity becomes uncertain, collection operators face disruptions. Trucks may be forced to wait, delay routes, or suspend service, particularly in remote or low-income neighborhoods where coverage is already inconsistent.
Street-level accumulation worsens, illegal dumping multiplies, and residents in marginalized zones bear the brunt of the system’s fragility. A saturated landfill also endangers public health. A 2024 publication titled Landslide Hazard Evaluation of a Large Waste Landfill in Bogota City, which analyzed Doña Juana, warns that as landfills reach or exceed capacity, waste stabilization becomes more precarious, increasing the risk of landslides or structural collapse. Doña Juana has experienced such events before, causing significant environmental damage.
Operating beyond its designed lifespan has forced managers to rely on informal or extra-licensed disposal zones. These makeshift extensions often lack adequate engineering controls, opening the door to leachate leaks, groundwater contamination, methane surges, pervasive odors, and unregulated dumping. Communities surrounding the landfill are the first affected. Dependence on one strained landfill also hinders Bogota’s transition to a more sustainable waste-management model. The city remains trapped in a “bury it and forget it” approach that discourages recycling or composting, even though an estimated 70% of the daily waste sent to Doña Juana is potentially recyclable or organic.
Uncertain future for Bogota’s remote neighborhoods after February 2026
The looming exhaustion of Doña Juana presents another critical challenge for Bogota, the expiration of the city’s waste-collection contracts in February 2026. What will happen to the most remote and hard-to-access neighborhoods once current operators are no longer bound by service obligations?
These areas, perched on steep hillsides, fringe neighborhoods connected by narrow or unpaved roads, and low-density zones far from central corridors, rely on specialized logistics. Smaller trucks, longer routes, and additional labor make them less profitable for private contractors. Under an open-competition model without territorial obligations, companies could prioritize dense urban sectors, leaving peripheral communities exposed to irregular service or outright neglect.
The Mayor’s Office has acknowledged these risks, emphasizing that maintaining universal coverage requires a regulated system with clear service obligations, rather than one where companies freely choose where to operate. However, the administration has not yet released a detailed contingency plan guaranteeing uninterrupted collection if new contracts face delays, disputes, or operational challenges.
Truth is, the unfolding crisis also exposes a deeper problem: The lack of long-term planning and the reliance on improvisation by the city administration. For years, the Mayor’s Office has struggled to implement a coherent strategy for waste collection and landfill management.
Instead of preparing new disposal infrastructure or expanding recycling and composting programs, authorities have repeatedly opted for temporary fixes — extending landfill operations beyond authorized limits, improvising additional disposal cells, and relying on emergency interventions at critical points.
For now, Mayor Carlos Fernando Galan has stated that the city is “working against the clock” to prevent service gaps and ensure all neighborhoods — including the most remote — remain covered. Yet the absence of a finalized operational blueprint has fueled concern among urban planners and local leaders, who warn that even brief interruptions in these vulnerable zones could rapidly escalate the broader waste crisis already unfolding across Bogota.
Bogota’s waste crisis is not the result of a single failure but of years of structural weaknesses colliding with a politically and administratively sensitive moment. Doña Juana is approaching the end of its useful life, the city lacks alternative disposal infrastructure, recycling and composting rates remain low, and remote neighborhoods face heightened vulnerability.
With February 2026 approaching, the administration must define a clear and enforceable collection model that guarantees universal service, whether through revised regulation, a hybrid structure, or a new public-private partnership. Until such a framework is in place, Bogota remains on the brink of a potential sanitation emergency, one that could redefine urban management, environmental policy, and quality of life in the capital for years to come.