In Indonesia, landfills are both a necessity and a warning sign. They serve as critical collection points for the country’s waste, preventing trash from ending up directly in rivers and oceans. Without them, the problem would be even more visible — and even more damaging to the environment. But landfills also reveal the scale of the waste crisis: many are overflowing or operating far beyond their intended capacity. In some regions, these sites receive thousands of kilograms of waste every single day — mountains of plastic, food scraps, and mixed materials with no sustainable plan for processing or reducing them. Once full, landfills are often shut down, but the waste remains — often leaching into soil, releasing harmful gases that boost climate change, and pushing the problem to a new location. Instead of being a long-term solution, they are more like a pause button in a growing emergency.