Biomining at landfills in Ghazipur, Bhalswa set to miss latest deadline

Delhi's biomining project to clear landfill sites likely to miss 2024 deadline. Slow progress due to fresh waste dumping and weather challenges.

The ongoing biomining project at two of the Capital’s three landfill sites — Ghazipur and Bhalswa — are likely to miss the latest deadline of 2024 to clear the sites, Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) officials aware of the matter said on Sunday.

The civic body admitted that the three landfill sites still have 17.2 million tonnes of legacy waste, due to which the deadline to clear the Ghazipur landfill has been pushed back from 2024 to 2026. (HT Archive)

Biomining is a process of separating various components of legacy waste such as plastic, paper, cloth, sand, and bricks by passing them through trommel machines, which act as cylindrical rotating sieves. MCD launched the biomining project to clear its three oversaturated landfill sites in July 2019 on directions of the National Green Tribunal, that directed that legacy waste dumps are to be “cleared within one year but substantial progress must be made and demonstrated within six months”.

Senior officials at the civic body, however, noted that there have been multiple revisions and extensions of these deadlines due to several reasons, including the slowdown in biomining due to the continued dumping of fresh waste, as well as the halting of work due to rainy weather during the monsoons. The civic body also faced problems with the disposal of inert material and plastic derived after the biomining process, but this issue was later resolved.

At present, the officials said, MCD is in line to clear only the Okhla landfill in December this year — a deadline set in March 2023 — as no fresh waste is being dumped on this location. In a progress taken report submitted to the Delhi Pollution Control Committee on February 17, the civic body admitted that the three landfill sites still have 17.2 million tonnes of legacy waste, due to which the deadline to clear the Ghazipur landfill has been pushed back from 2024 to 2026, while the Bhalswa landfill will be cleared by 2025.

The report, a copy of which HT has seen, also noted that the addition of fresh waste at the Ghazipur and Bhalswa sites is slowing down the biomining process.

An MCD official said that 58 trommel machines are currently deployed at the three landfill sites — 22 machines at Bhalswa, 25 at Ghazipur, and 11 at Okhla.

“The performance of the contractor at the Ghazipur landfill site has been slow, and we have issued several warnings. The company is facing internal challenges. Meanwhile, we are unable to hire new companies as the MCD standing committee is not in place,” the official said, referring to a powerful 18-member committee that controls the purse strings of the civic body.