Minister raises a stink: Solid waste management solutions not tech-driven

“It is terribly sad that a city like Mumbai does not segregate waste. There cannot be a Swachh Bharat until there is proper solid waste management, unless industrial pollution is stopped from reaching rivers and until sewage is treated before release into water bodies. I have asked them (authorities) to review the matter in a time-bound manner, and then the Centre will easily give clearances. This issue has been neglected for the past 10 years, but with the change in the state government, you can hope for better management.”

Javadekar and other officials did not step out of their cars at the Deonar dumping ground, which houses towers of unsegregated, unprocessed garbage way above the Airport Authority of India’s permissible limit of 35m, which is the height of a 10-storey building.

[related-post]

Of the 9,400 tonnes of municipal solid waste generated in the city each day, the Deonar dumping ground, which is slated for closure since 2011, receives 6,500 tonne and Mulund dumping ground receives 3000 tonne. The civic body has recently proposed to acquire 126 hectare of land outside Mumbai at Taloja from the state to ease the burden on existing dumping grounds. Of the three dumping grounds currently in use, none have a waste processing unit, and mostly unsegregated, untreated garbage is just dumped there.

At Kanjurmarg, BMC has proposed to process 3000 tonne of solid waste per day by bioreactor landfill method and remaining 1000 tonne per day by windrow composting- technologies, which have been challenged by environmentalists and solid waste management experts for its feasibility in a flood-prone low-lying Kanjurmarg plot.

Raising suspicion over the expertise of the contractor selected by BMC to process waste at Kanjurmarg dumping ground, Javadekar said, “We don’t know what kind of work he has done before and his expertise with waste management. It is sad that we only look at the lowest bidder for a project. We should get a scientific team together to approve such contract work, especially since we are still groping in the dark when it comes to a clear cut technology to process the kind of waste (unsegregated) that we get in Mumbai.”

Javadekar also dismissed BMC’s claims to convert waste into energy, saying the waste in America had high calorific value, unlike the unsegregated waste that reached the city’s dumping grounds that could not produce sufficient energy.