Delhi LG, CM Kejriwal launch capital’s first engineered landfill site

Lieutenant governor VK Saxena and chief minister Arvind Kejriwal inaugurated the first engineered landfill site of the city in Tehkhand, which is located next to the Okhla dumpsite. It is the Capital’s fourth landfill site and has a capacity to hold almost a million tonnes of waste and will only be used to dump ashes and burnt material generated from the city’s four waste-to-energy plants.
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LG said that the site has been developed under the central government’s Swachh Bharat Mission 1.0 at the cost of ₹42.3 crore. “The construction work started in September 2021. The operationalisation of this project will help in scientific disposal of waste in the city,” he added.
Chief minister Kejriwal said, “The facility will have arrangements to process the ash generated after disposal of garbage in the plants for which 15 acres of land has been developed. We are continuously working to make Delhi clean and pollution-free and are also getting success.”
An MCD official aware of the matter said that the engineered landfill site has been developed with the help of IIT-Delhi. “Around 500 tonnes of ash from the waste-to-energy plants will be dumped in this engineered sanitary landfill (E-SLF) every day. For dumping waste in this facility, the plant operators will be charged ₹300 per tonne of garbage by municipal corporation of Delhi (MCD). This will help them incentivise to find alternative methods to reuse the ashes,” the MCD official said. Delhi’s four waste-to-energy (WtE) plants produce around 1,200 tonnes per day (TPD) garbage, which is dumped on the landfill sites. The MCD is planning to set up a second E-SLF in Sultanpur Dabas in north Delhi to cater to the other waste-to-energy plants.
Unlike these dumpsites, an engineered landfill site ensures the disposal of waste in a technical and scientific manner, and has a provision for a leachate treatment plant to avoid leachate percolation in the ground. The project was approved in 2018 by the erstwhile South MCD, and the work was awarded in September 2021. The stadium-shaped giant pit with depth of around 7 metre sits right next to the oversaturated dumpsite in Okhla. It has 3.5 m high wall as barriers around it and the bottom surface is covered with five layers of geotextile barriers to prevent any contamination of the environment. MCD will also develop bio-fencing in the form of thick vegetation around the facility.
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Another MCD official said that the slope of the landfill has been fixed with installation of pipes under the bottom layers of geotextile to ensure that all the water from the site is collected towards the rear end where a leachate treatment plant has been established. “The leachate treatment plant has a capacity to treat around 100 KLD (kilo litres per day) leachate. This will prevent ground water contamination,” the official added.
MCD has estimated that the Tehkhand E-SLF will be completely filled with ashes and burnt material in seven to eight years after which the site will be capped and closed down.