You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day.

I'm your host, Elise Hu. It turns out the smell is the least of our worries when it comes to landfills.

In this talk, sustainability strategist Mohammed A. Sultan shares why methane gas, the odorless,

invisible gas, is so dangerous for our health and our well-being.

Showcasing different examples of sustainable development projects across the African continent,

he offers an alternative path towards a world with low methane emissions

and shares why this is not only good for the planet, but good for people everywhere. Have you ever smelled a landfill?

Well, that smell is probably not the worst thing that it produces.

Methane gases, and you cannot see it or smell it until it catches fire.

And that's, unfortunately, what's been happening in many cities across the continent. In Dakar, in Akra, in Kampala, and Osaka,

and recently at the Peter Maddozburg landfill in South Africa.

I'll just imagine being one of the thousands of kids affected by that fire.

Every breath you take is kind of a tighter chest, a sharper headache.

It's really unacceptable.

And these landfills, they catch fire for many

reasons. One of them is that we keep sending organic waste there that decays in the absence of

oxygen, creating the conditions for messing to come up. There's many ways that we know how to solve

this question of dangerous landfills. First of all, stop producing as much waste in sending it there,

sort and treat what's already there,

and radically improve the governance of those sites.

Doing that homework has immediate benefits,

particularly for populations living nearby.

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