Waste collection gains pace in Chandigarh, but disposal still stuck in slow lane

Though improvement in door-to-door collection of segregated garbage, sweeping and placement of litter bins in public spaces can help Chandigarh attain better rankings in the 2023 edition of Swachh Survekshan, garbage disposal and processing may prove to be the city’s undoing.

The central government had launched Swachh Survekshan in 2016 to evaluate cleanliness in public spaces and toilets, and gauge the municipality’s performance in waste collection, segregation and processing.

The Chandigarh municipal corporation has already set in motion long-term projects for waste management. But with the projects months away from getting operational, unprocessed wet waste is still being dumped at the Dadumajra landfill — a site where mountains of the city’s legacy waste are only growing taller.

The city generates around 550 metric tonnes (MT) of garbage daily, of which around 374 MT is wet waste while the remaining is dry, including horticulture and sanitary waste.

While the dry waste is completely processed on a daily basis, the capacity of wet waste processing plant at Dadumajra is less than 200 MT daily, even after upgrades and extensions.

As such, most of city’s daily wet waste is dumped at the Dadumajra landfill without processing, leading to mountains of waste.

Though MC has initiated the process to set up a new integrated waste processing plant that will process all of the daily waste, it will take around 24 months to get operational, which includes the construction period after allotment of project. In the meantime, MC is working on setting up a temporary plant to process the wet waste.

In the 2022 Swachh Survekshan rankings, Chandigarh was ranked 12th among cities with more than 1 lakh population, an improvement from 2021, when the city was ranked 16th among cities with more than 10 lakh population and 66th nationally.

Of a total of 7500 points, Chandigarh scored 6209 in last year’s cleanliness survey. The city had scored 2512 points out of 3000 in the Service Level Progress component, 600 out of 1250 points in the garbage-free city (GFC) certification, 1000 out of 1000 in the ODF certification head, and 2096 points out of 2250 in the Citizens Voice category.

The city had lost most of the marks in GFC category, mainly due to dump site remediation; processing of sanitary and domestic hazardous waste; waste processing and capacity for dry waste; sale of waste by-products; grievance redressal; plastic ban and garbage processing by bulk-waste generators.

In a bid to improve on rankings this year, the civic body started garbage collection from city’s commercial areas and also ensured adequate placement of twin litterbins in commercial areas, public spaces and parks/gardens/green belts.

Other initiatives included collection of flower waste from all religious places that is processed to make incense sticks through Project ARPAN, proper enforcement of plastic ban, challans for littering and non-segregation of waste, and various awareness campaigns.

‘Bio-remediation of entire legacy waste by January 2024’

City mayor Anup Gupta said, “We have completed bioremediation of over 55% legacy waste lying dumped at Dadumajra. The bioremediation of a legacy dump of 5 LMT has already been completed whereas in terms of second legacy waste mountain, 2 LMT out of the total 7.67 LMT waste has also been processed. We aim to complete the bio-remediation of entire legacy waste by January 2024.”

“Considering growing waste production, a project has been proposed for Integrated Solid Waste Management with projections of 15 years. Work is also in process to set up a temporary wet waste plant so that untreated waste is not dumped at the Dadumajra landfill,” the mayor said, adding that all arrangements had been made to make Chandigarh cleaner and greener, and they were expecting improvement in rankings.

MC commissioner Anindita Mitra said, “Civic body had signed an MoU with two agencies, and city’s sanitary waste and domestic hazard waste received at Material Recovery Facility (MRF) centres are now being processed completely. We are also running a dedicated horticulture waste processing plant.”