A procession of garbage trucks boxed-in our van for most of the drive into the landfill. Barren heaps of gray-brown dirt contrast with thick trees and the strikingly blue bay in the distance. The center of the dump, where cranes compact industrial waste, looks like a warzone—a dusty, filthy, deafeningly far cry from the glittery sheen of Hong Kong, where tycoons and traders move money in tall glass towers.

On the eastern shores of jam-packed, frenetic Hong Kong are miles of tranquil beachside and protected country parks. The area is a welcome oasis for day-trippers and families alike. But just over five miles away, a dump housing 4,500 tons of solid waste is swallowing the land.

This densely packed Chinese metropolis of 7.4 million people has a major waste problem. That's because there are no full-scale recycling plants, and people generally aren't educated about environmental awareness. Hong Kong, an autonomous territory that covers 427 square-miles and currently boasts the fourth highest population density of any sovereign territory or state in the world, disposes of a dramatic 15,000 tons of trash every day. That's the equivalent of throwing out the Brooklyn Bridge each night—and still having a couple hundred tons to spare.

Trash-movers drive over a mound of industrial waste in the center of SENT, on Hong Kong's eastern shore. Image: Justin Heifetz

In 2012, the legislature granted funding to expand the three garbage sites. At the time, the government expected the landfills would fill up by 2018. The government now foresees that timeline to be, vaguely, somewhere in the 2020s. But the clock is ticking.

Welcome to the Southeast New Territories Landfill, or SENT, one of the three operational landfills in Hong Kong. (The other two landfills are located near the border with Mainland China and on Hong Kong's northwestern shore.) Together, the three waste sites occupy a combined 560 acres of land and store nearly all of the city's trash. The problem is, all three are approaching maximum capacity, to the point the dumps are expected to run out of space in just a matter of years, according to Hong Kong's government.

The government's proposed answers for dealing with Hong Kong's garbage problem, such as building an incinerator that would emit toxic pollutants into the city's air while burning trash, are often radically unsustainable. And while Hong Kong does recycle some materials, the city is unable to reap most of the benefits of doing so because the recyclables are sent abroad.

With SENT's manager, who was not permitted to speak on the record due to government restrictions, as my guide, I went inside the sprawling, 250-acre dump to understand why it's almost filled to the brim, and what happens after that.

Unless the landfill is expanded by the government, SENT must cease operations once the compacted solid trash reaches the highest level of the site. A marker, seen in the distance, denotes the top-most level. Image: Justin Heifetz

"We understand that the current practice of disposing of food waste at landfills is neither sustainable nor environmentally desirable," Joanna Tse, a spokesperson for the government's Environmental Protection Department (EPD), said in a written statement provided to Motherboard. "In the future, landfill space will be more prudently used as a last resort."

In Hong Kong's landfills, waste is compacted before being covered with a layer of soil at night. The water that seeps through that decomposing waste is then treated in facilities. The government's legislature acknowledged in a panel over a decade ago that the highly toxic substance, called leachate, runs off into the city's groundwater.

"The truth is that government is also looking for land for housing development, and now garbage is competing with housing for people," said Lau. "We should not be thinking we can seriously continue expecting to expand our landfills. This isn't [Mainland] China, where there is lots of land."

The government is considering expanding the landfills even further. But in space-hungry Hong Kong, where skyrocketing property prices are among the most expensive in the world , there are few places left to build.

Read more: Garbage Contains All of the Nutrients Missing from Our Diets

"The consumer will just continue to generate waste and the government will burn it all. It's the wrong concept," Edwin Lau, founder and executive director of Green Earth, an active Hong Kong-based non-profit environmental lobby group, said in a phone interview. "I think the government understands the need for holistic waste management, but they need to push useful and effective policy and measures to engage the community."

The government's alternatives to landfills are extreme, if not unusual. A waste management facility slated for its first phase of operation by 2025 is projected to burn 3,000 tons of garbage each day using what the legislature is calling " advanced incineration ." The facility, on an outlying island built from reclaimed land, has already been widely criticized for the damage it will cause to both Hong Kong's air quality and marine life.

While the city issues standard three-compartment recycling bins for paper, plastic, and metal in residential complexes and office buildings, most of those materials do not get recycled in Hong Kong. Because land is scarce and comes at such a premium here, securing the area for a large-scale recycling facility is expensive. (Land in Hong Kong can also be reclaimed from the sea, a costly choice the government made for the incinerator.)

The obvious solution to landfills brimming with trash would be a strong recycling program. But this has proven difficult for the Hong Kong government.

"If they push all of this waste into an incinerator, there will be air pollution from everything they're burning," Read said. "The incinerator could create really toxic sludge."

Tracey Read, the founder and CEO of Hong Kong-based charity Plastic Free Seas, told me over the phone she wonders why the government spent $2.4 billion on the waste incinerator rather than a large-scale recycling center.

"The truth is that government is also looking for land for housing development, and now garbage is competing with housing for people."

Much of the mounting waste problem comes down to mindset. Hong Kong has had its own government for 20 years now, though it has yet to successfully address the territory's deep-seated environmental issues. At the grassroots, many people have little concern when it comes to the basics of waste mitigation: reduce, reuse, and recycle. As such, Hong Kong generates over 3,300 tons per day in food waste alone, and there is little regard for single-use plastics, which are clogging the city's shores .

"The vast majority of processed recyclables are exported to the [Chinese] Mainland and other economies and cities for further processing into recycled products," said Tse. "Only a very small portion is recycled into products locally, such as biodiesel and wood fuel."

Hong Kong mostly sells its waste to developing cities in Southeast Asia, according to both Lau and Read. The EPD did not elaborate on where the recyclables are sent and why, but Lau told me that there are few major operators and that to his knowledge, much of the recycling goes to Malaysia and Thailand.

On a recent tour of a garbage dump in Manila, Read claims to have seen Hong Kong's recycled material among the trash. Mainland China only accepts pelleted plastics (plastics broken down by a machine into tiny bits) because the government is strict about the waste it imports, a hardline trash policy referred to as the Green Fence. Hong Kong does not have a pelleting machine—meaning, those plastics are moving elsewhere through Asia.

In Southeast Asia, Read said, "You had kids living and growing up in these dump areas and kids handling e-waste and sorting through recyclables. There's no tracing of recyclables. It's a dark area. You don't know where things are ending up.

"We also know things being sent for recycling, including from Hong Kong, were just ending up dumped in the ocean," she added.

"We saw grime-soaked workers smoking cigarettes between breaks, surrounded by toxic—and potentially flammable—digital detritus."

Hong Kong's haphazard recycling program earns few local benefits. It largely cuts off the possibility of creating value for money on recyclables. By way of example, Lau said, think of a plastic bottle. That plastic can be recycled into fibers, which can then be spun into clothing.