MCD draws up plan to utilise cleared landfill sites

The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) has begun planning for the utilisation of 202 acres of land spread across the Capital’s three landfill sites, that it has committed to clear by December 2024, officials aware of the matter said on Wednesday.

MCD aims to use the three sites at Okhla, Bhalswa and Ghazipur, when cleared, to set up five waste processing plants and three engineered landfill sites. The engineered landfill site will not be used to dump fresh waste but will be used to store ash and burnt material derived from waste-to-energy plants.

According to the plans, the periphery of the three sites will be used for the development of green belts to be used as a buffer for nearby residential areas, the officials said.

A municipal official said that Ghazipur, the Capital’s oldest and largest landfill site, is expected to host the maximum number of waste processing facilities. “The 70-acre site is expected to host an engineered landfill site with a capacity to hold 1 million m³ of material over 27 acres, a new waste-to-energy plant with 2000 tonnes per day capacity, a bio-CNG plant over 25 acres, along with a smaller C&D waste plant to process 1000 tonnes of debris every day. It will be an integrated waste processing facility to cater to all types of waste,” the official said.

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The MCD plan, a copy of which has been seen by HT, says the flattened Okhla site will host an engineered landfill, along with a 1000 tonnes per day C&D waste plant, while Bhalswa in north Delhi will host bio-methanation or waste-to-energy plants to cater to 2000 tonnes of waste per day, along with an engineered landfill.

The plans have been shared with the Delhi government on April 6. Since the land use for the landfill sites is already earmarked for waste processing, it will not need additional approvals.

Bharati Chaturvedi, environmentalist and founder of Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group said that the corporation will invariably get mixed waste after the landfill sites are cleared unless we manage one year of sustained on-site composting. “Be sure that just clearing the site will not mean, the landfill be free. They will get mixed waste. We should develop engineered landfill for inert waste. Apart from Bio CNG government should invest in decentralized processing. There is no space for dismantling,” she added. Chaturvedi said that we should increase more material recovery facilities, dry waste collection centers and decentralized composting centers. “A lot of hyper segregation of waste is happening on the side on drains. We need more inclusive approach with much stricter regimes for plastic waste.”

MCD primarily processes waste at the three landfills by bio-mining and remediation, in which various components of waste, such as plastic, paper, cloth, sand, bricks, are segregated by passing them through trommel machines, which are cylindrical rotating sieves. Delhi’s landfill biomining project was initiated in 2019 on the orders of the National Green Tribunal (NGT).

Clearing the landfill sites was one of the 10 pre-poll guarantees made by the Aam Aadmi Party in run-up to the MCD polls in December last year. The civic body, in its budget for 2023-24, had affirmed expedited deadlines to clear the landfill sites.

Delhi currently operates three construction and demolition (C&D) waste plants and four waste-to-energy plants, which process around 74% of the 11,000 tonnes waste that the city generates daily.

“The daily waste generation is expected to go up to 14,500 tonnes by 2031 and 19,500 tonnes by 2041, and the waste processing facilities need to be planned in advance to prevent any new unplanned landfill sites to come up. The nature of the new facilities will also depend on the extent of waste segregation being enforced in the city,” a second official said, declining to be named.

The Capital’s first engineered landfill site is being developed at southeast Delhi’s Tehkhand, which will be operational by September, while the city’s second engineered landfill is expected to come up in northwest Delhi’s Sultanpur Dabas. The time-frame for Sultanpur Dabas will be clear after MCD secures approval from the forest department to use the site. Including the three such sites at Okhla, Bhalswa and Ghazipur, Delhi will have five engineered landfill sites around two years after the landfill sites are cleared.