In a recent report, a panel of India’s Parliament noted their observations on landfill sites in Delhi, writing that the height of Ghazipur landfill site has reached as high as 65 metres which is just eight metres less than the height of the national monument Qutub Minar”.
Ghazipur is one of the main garbage dumping sites of Delhi.
The national capital is sitting on a garbage bomb with about 46 percent of municipal solid waste left unprocessed. Major landfill sites are filled beyond their capacity, reflecting the apathy of the authorities.
Highlighting the magnitude of the garbage, the panel’s report “Air pollution in Delhi and the national capital region” noted that that they were informed by the Delhi government that against the total generation of 10,400 tonnes per day (TPD) of municipal solid waste (MSW), only 5,600 TPD of MSW is processed in Delhi leaving a gap of 4,800 TPD of MSW to be processed.
The report noted that the Delhi government has a proposal for adding a capacity to process waste upto 5,400 TPD in the next two years. At present, there are three landfill sites in Delhi, Bhalswa, Ghazipur and Okhla landfills, which were commissioned in 1994, 1984 and in 1996 respectively but all of them have been declared exhausted, even then the untreated waste is still being dumped there.
On Delhi government’s plan of setting up new waste-to-energy plants and enhancing the processing capacity of the existing plants, the panel remarked that it hopes that the “timeline fixed to complete the proposed action plan would be realised”.
They drew attention of Delhi authorities towards a method developed by the CSIR-Indian Institute Petroleum (IIP) Dehradun by which “polyolefinic waste plastics like polyethylene and polypropylene (like carry bags, household plastic utensils) can be converted exclusively into any one of the products – gasoline or diesel or aromatics along with simultaneous production of (LPG) like gases.” The panel asked the government to take the institute’s help if required.
Reference- Mongabay, PIB, CSIR website