Rai said, “During the meeting with experts, many other suggestions were also discussed. Ideas such as installing gas wells, covering waste with soil by roughly 10 cm, and sorting waste into six categories were considered in order to prevent fire incidents by taking action at the earliest.”
A “gas sucking system” to absorb emissions of methane gas from landfill sites will be adopted at the Ghazipur landfill to deal with fire incidents, according to a communication from Delhi Environment Minister Gopal Rai’s office.
The Delhi government has given orders to the “MCD and the Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC) to adopt the gas sucking system installed at Mumbai’s dumping site to provide a permanent solution to the problem of fire incidents at landfill sites,” Rai said. Orders have been issued to send combined teams of the DPCC and the MCD to Mumbai to get “information about the working model of the gas sucking system,” he added. The Ghazipur landfill falls under the East Delhi Municipal Corporation’s jurisdiction.
Rai held a meeting on Thursday with representatives from the DPCC, MCD, IIT Delhi, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), GAIL and ICAR-IARI to discuss measures to mitigate fire incidents at the Ghazipur landfill. Methane gas generated by decomposition of organic waste at the landfill can lead to fires. Fires have broken out thrice at the landfill recently, the latest incident being one on Wednesday.
Rai said, “During the meeting with experts, many other suggestions were also discussed. Ideas such as installing gas wells, covering waste with soil by roughly 10 cm, and sorting waste into six categories were considered in order to prevent fire incidents by taking action at the earliest.”
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Dr Suneel Pandey at TERI, who attended the meeting on Thursday, said, “One option to address the issue of methane is to set up a gas clearing system at the site, where gas wells are installed and the methane is flared. It was implemented earlier in Mumbai. A similar system will have to be implemented at Ghazipur, but it will require significant investment. In Mumbai, the gas was trapped and flared. At the Ghazipur landfill, GAIL had set up a gas extraction system earlier and wanted to see if it can be used as transport fuel. But the methane composition in the gas was low, and it could not be used for transport fuel. When the gas pressure was high, power was being produced, and when the pressure dropped, the system was closed.”
Richa Singh, programme officer, Waste Management Programme, CSE, said gas wells are interim solutions, but are not an efficient option. “Since the landfill at Ghazipur is unscientific, we don’t know if gas rings will be able to efficiently capture the gas,” said Singh, who attended the meeting.
Atin Biswas, programme director, Municipal Solid Waste, CSE, who was also present there, said gas suction mechanisms have limited success. “The mechanism to extract gas is created when you are constructing a scientific landfill. It is part of the construction protocol to lay pipelines to collect gas. Ideally, we should have a pilot project in a smaller space before large-scale application,” he said. The NGT and the Swachh Bharat Mission mandates are to biomine these landfills, he added.
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