After Bhawal, another waste plant rises inside Sreepur’s Sal forest

Roughly two kilometres from the Sreepur Upazila Parishad, upon entering the forest, a mysterious trail appears.

A concrete road, wide enough for a truck — as if deliberately designed for it — leads to the forest. We followed the trail, and stumbled upon something we didn't expect inside one of the last Sal forests standing in the country — a waste treatment plant.  

For years, tonnes of waste have piled up on the roads on the outskirts of Sreepur. Once, Sreepur was known as a default getaway inside nature — one of the last resorts for people wanting a break from Dhaka's monotony. 

Now, the name is almost synonymous with a huge waste dump.

The heavy industrialisation of Gazipur, where Sreepur is located, came at a cost. As the city corporation and municipality struggled with the waste an increasingly industrialised region produced, the municipality decided to build a waste treatment centre — one where garbage wouldn't just be dumped, but treated, transferred, and put to use.

The problem is where they chose to build the Pachultia waste management plant. To save the city from its waste, the municipality drove an access road straight through reserved forest land — the same tract that Forest Department records describe as gazetted protected land — and built the plant itself right under the forest's nose, hemmed in on all sides by Sal trees.

This patch of forest belongs to the wider Madhupur Sal tract, a distinct ecosystem found almost nowhere else in Bangladesh. Leopards, elephants, and tigers once roamed this wider belt; today only deer, owls, cobras, pythons, and a handful of other species remain, in a forest already recording sharp declines in species diversity. It is into this shrinking, already-stressed ecosystem that Sreepur's waste infrastructure has been built.

The construction of the facility is now almost complete. Inside, heavy machines and generators built to process the waste already hum and buzz through the day — audible past the boundary wall meant to contain them. That wall sits right at the edge of the forest, the last thin line between the plant's operations and the Sal trees beyond it.

No environmental clearance at all 

The most serious question raised concerns the plant's environmental clearance. Under existing law and regulation, obtaining approval and an environmental clearance certificate from the Department of Environment (DoE) is mandatory before constructing or operating any waste management plant. 

But the DoE says no such clearance has been obtained for Sreepur Pourashava's Pachultia waste management plant to date.

Gazipur DoE Deputy Director Arefin Badal said, "Obtaining environmental clearance is mandatory for constructing any type of waste management plant. But Sreepur Pourashava never even applied for clearance to build the waste management plant. So no clearance was given either."

As a result, a string of questions have emerged around this waste management plant, built at a cost of crores of taka inside reserved forest: who granted permission to cut through forest to build the road, was proper demarcation carried out before construction began, and how was the initiative to build and operate the plant undertaken without any Department of Environment clearance at all?

"Obtaining environmental clearance is mandatory for constructing any type of waste management plant. But Sreepur Pourashava never even applied for clearance to build the waste management plant. So no clearance was given either."  Arefin Badal, Deputy Director, Department of Environment, Gazipur district 

A road built at night

Months earlier, the Ministry had separately addressed the road leading to the Waste Plant.

A previous TBS investigation found Bhawal National Park's boundary breached, trees felled, and a portion of the reserve forest burned. Forest officials halted the work when construction crews failed to produce a legal permit — but the crews later returned at night, digging through the forest floor and breaking through the park's boundary wall with an excavator.

The same pattern has now repeated in Sreepur.

According to UNO Nahid Bhuya, an unpaved road already existed inside the forest, and the Forest Department permitted its continued use to transport waste to the plant.

But according to local sources and others familiar with the matter, no road existed leading to the site at the time construction began in 2021. Trees inside the reserve forest were cut down to carve out an unpaved road, built specifically to transport construction materials into the forest.

Sreepur Pourashava sources say the municipality purchased 110 decimals of land at Pachultia mouza in 2020 —  despite no road existing into the reserved forest at the time — for a registered value of Tk77 lakh. Trees were cleared and a road built the following year, alongside construction of the plant itself.

Separately, letters exchanged between forest officials and the municipality on 29 July 2026 document the road dispute directly. A concrete RCC road was being built without any permission at all, according to the letters. 

When officials confronted the labourers and ordered them to stop, they temporarily did. But they returned at night, just as had happened in Bhawal, and today a wide concrete road runs through the middle of the forest, leading straight to the waste plant — a construction Divisional Forest Officer Bashirul Al Mamun directly cited as a "clear violation" of the Forest Act 1927.

The question is, if the work was legal, why was it done at night, when no one was around to see it?

According to the chief executive of BELA, Syeda Rizwana Hasan, under the Forest Conservation Act 2026, a municipality-run waste facility is not permissible adjacent to protected forest land, regardless of whether trees are felled or not.

She sees the relocation clause used in the permit itself as an admission. "The ministry has used the pretext of 'temporary use,' and hence it has neither specified any time limit nor mentioned an alternate place for relocation," she said. "The ministry didn't need to be shy."

Crisis solved, but at what cost?

According to Nahid Bhuya, the Upazila Nirbahi Officer of Sreepur, the waste treatment plant sits on municipality land, though he acknowledged that the road leading to it falls under the forest's territory. 

He identified three major problems of Sreepur, and marked the waste crisis as number one. This waste treatment plant, according to him, will largely solve Sreepur's waste management crisis.

Asked whether this amounts to a violation of the Forest Act 1927, he explained how the plant would function and why, in his view, it poses no threat to the surrounding Sal forest.

"The waste treatment plant will burn the solid wastes and convert it to nitrogen gas, which is not significantly harmful," he said. "Liquid and recyclable waste would be processed into fertiliser for sale in various markets."

But environmentalist Ahmed Kamruzzaman Mazumdar is skeptical of the entire process.

Even without burning, he explained, waste left to decompose releases leachate — a form of wastewater that turns acidic as it forms, and which, if it infiltrates the soil, contaminates groundwater. 

Leachate also carries heavy metals and pathogenic bacteria, he said, and can contaminate surface water bodies through runoff or spread through the air once it dries, exposing nearby communities to disease.

Burning isn't a clean alternative either, he said. Incineration produces carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide; leaving waste unburned produces methane, a greenhouse gas even more potent than CO2. Both pathways, he said, pose a serious threat to the surrounding ecology, biodiversity, forest, and wildlife.

"Concentrating this kind of waste in any sensitive ecosystem — and a forest is a sensitive ecosystem — is in no way environmentally or scientifically sound," he said. "It will permanently harm that ecology."

Asked whether precautions or boundaries could contain the risk, his answer was direct: proximity itself is the threat, regardless of safeguards. Pathogens spread in all directions, he said, harming trees, birds, and insects; elevated methane raises local temperature and creates toxicity that drives pollinators away. 

Without birds and insects visiting flowering trees, pollination fails — and without pollination, the forest cannot propagate itself. "It's a chain reaction. If something like a transfer station or waste management facility is built inside a forest like this, it will cause harm to wildlife and nature."

The waste treatment facility cost almost Tk6.5 crore to build, according to the UNO Nahid Bhuya. And it may solve Sreepur's waste crisis — to some extent. But the question is, at what cost?