South Delhi civic body: Engineered landfill to be set up at Tehkhand by next year

The landfill will have provisions for leachate collection, safe dumping, processing and disposal. The present landfills in Delhi are open dumping sites and do not have any mechanism to collect waste scientifically or stop leachate which pollutes the groundwater.

The civic body has also set a target to stop dumping of waste at the Okhla Landfill site by June 2022 and scientifically close it by the end of 2023.

For this, the civic body said that the inert material, which is produced during the process of bio-mining of legacy waste at the landfill, will be used for construction of roads.

SDMC commissioner Gyanesh Bharti said that the civic body has had meetings with the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) in connection with use of inert material for construction of roads. “We are very positive and hopeful that they will use the inert materials for road construction. They are checking the durability of the material,” Bharti added.

Dinesh Yadav, the director of the department of environment management services (DEMS) at SDMC, said that inert materials can be used for road development projects and the Central Road Research Institute (CRRI) has also conducted a study on it.

“If everything goes as planned, we will supply inert materials to NHAI which they will use in construction projects of Urban Extension Road-2 (UER-2) and a highway near Kalindi Kunj (Kalindi Kunj bypass),” Yadav added.

Earlier, the East Delhi Municipal Corporation had, in March this year, announced the use of inert material in construction of a 800-metre stretch of a service road in Kalyanpuri near the Delhi-Meerut Expressway.

SDMC has empanelled 13 private agencies to collect its inert waste which had been building up at the site. Of the nearly 3,600 metric tonnes of garbage generated in South Delhi every day, only 50 per cent is processed by the SDMC and the rest is dumped at the Okhla landfill.

Yadav said that the civic body will start operationalising a waste-to-energy plant in June 2022. The plant in Tahkhand will have the capacity to process 2,000 metric tonnes of waste.

“After this plant is operational, we will be able to stop dumping garbage and shut the Okhla landfill site by the end of 2023,” Yadav said.

The civic body has been struggling with handling and dumping of inert material which has been piling up at the site. According to officials, at least 60%-70% of the waste processed during bio-mining is inert, which can be used for filling low-lying areas or as base filling for construction of roads.