NEW DELHI: The national capital will be cleared of its three “mountains of garbage” by December 2024, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal claimed on Friday while visiting the Okhla site. “The Okhla landfill will be cleared by December 2023- January 2024, another mountain by May, and the last one six months later,” he said.The city’s three landfills at Ghazipur, Bhalswa and Okhla were commissioned in 1984, 1994 and 1996, respectively. The Okhla landfill has reached its saturation point and contains about 40 lakh metric tonnes of legacy waste in it, despite removal of 20-25 lakh MT in the past few years, Kejriwal said. “The scheduled date to remove this mountain of garbage is by May 2024. But, all officers and engineers are working on it, and our target is to try to remove it by December 2023,” he said. There is a lot of capacity for biomining here – about 17,000 MT – but the capacity to remove waste from the landfill and dispose it of is less, the CM added. The current daily disposal capacity at Okhla is 4,000-4,500MT. But by April 1, “we will augment it to 10,000MT daily. By June, we expect to augment it further to 15,000MT. If we go by the 15,000MT capacity, we will reach our target of cleaning this site by December-January, and locals will also get relief”, Kejriwal said, adding that he would visit the site again for an inspection. After the site is cleared, Kejriwal said, a big construction and demolition waste plant will be built to make bricks. A biomethanation plant has also been planned. Similarly, work is also underway at Ghazipur and Bhalswa landfills, and “when we visit there in the next couple of days, we will take stock of the situations there too”, he said.Delhi BJP spokesperson Praveen Shankar Kapoor claimed that Kejrowal had made no new announcement as Municipal Corporation of Delhi, during the inauguration of the waste-to-energy plant in Tughlaqabad in November 2022, declared that the Okhla landfill would be cleared in about a year. The plant uses garbage from the Okhla landfill. Frequent fires at the landfills and leachate generated over time and the accumulated legacy waste add to air and water pollution in Delhi. The city daily generates around 11,400 metric tonnes of garbage.
Source: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/delhi-will-be-free-of-3-mountains-of-garbage-by-december-2024-cm-arvind-kejriwal/articleshow/98401359.cms
