Shocking footage of one of the world's largest landfills that's home to 20,000 people

Many of us will know that feeling after coming home from a long week at work, looking around our home, and thinking, "Wow, what a tip."

It's a pretty first-world problem considering there are people around the world who live in actual landfills, with up to 20,000 people calling one of the world's biggest home.

While the likes of Elon Musk claim recycling is 'pointless', it's thought that the amount of rubbish we're littering the planet with is only helping accelerate global warming beyond previous expectations.

Even for those who aren't concerned about the state of the Earth, you could (literally) be throwing money away by not checking what you can recycle. In the USA, the municipal solid waste (MSW) recycling rate sits at just 32%, which is still considerably higher than the global average of just 19%. What's even more alarming is that only about 9% of global plastic waste is recycled, with the rest ending up in landfills.

It's not just billions in Bitcoin you might find in landfills, as Jakarta's Bantar Gebang is said to be home to anywhere between 15,000 and 20,000 people.

Footage of Bantar Gebang has gone viral on Reddit, showing off the unimaginable scale of the landfill that stretches for over 100 hectares. This means it's about the size of 200 football fields and is known to have towered as high as 100 feet with an estimated 45 million tons of garbage.

In 2020, The New York Times did a piece on Bantar Gebang and those who are so poor, they come here to live and work.

The outlet explained how up to 7,000 tons of waste come from Indonesia's capital every day.

As well as an 'overpowering' stench, those who scavenge through these mountains of trash have to look out for bulldozers and even frequent landslides.

Even though officials claim 6,000 people live in 'squalid villages' that have popped up around the mountain of trash, locals claim it's closer to 20,000.

According to Asep Gunawan, the head of Bantar Gebang district, which also includes the landfill, children as young as five have turned into trash pickers. Expanding on what life is like here, he continued: "They have kindergarten and Quran study there, and when they finish that, they help their parents. It is easy to pick trash with just an iron stick. And they have no other choice."

Some ingenious workers have even made makeshift shelters that sell refreshments and cigarettes to others in the pile.

Trash pickers are known as 'pemuling' in Indonesian, and earn between $2 and $10 a day from scavenging everything from electronic waste to animal bones.

Responding to the harrowing footage of the landfill in action and reminding some of WALL-E, one Redditor said: "Poor people who make their living pulling scrap out of the trash. Found in almost every country, the worse the country, the closer to the trash they work."

Another recalled visiting a similar experience in Latin America and explained: " I remember we once went to the local landfill to bring them food, water, and clothes, especially gloves and boots because they're handling dangerous trash all day. We were told later that they sold everything we gave them because for them, the money was worth more than their well-being."

A third concluded: "This makes me feel sad about our impending doom and destruction of our world. This is so sad."