India’s oldest, largest landfill: How BMC plans to clear the mountain of garbage at Mumbai’s Deonar

Sudhakar Shinde, additional municipal commissioner who heads the solid waste management (SWM) department in the BMC, said that the idea is to recover the entire land parcel so that it could be used for any useful purpose.

“The dumping ground is over 100 hectares in size and our objective is to free this land from the heap of garbage by treating them scientifically. In the long run, we want to use this land for some purpose that would benefit the citizens,” Shinde told The Indian Express.

The Deonar landfill is considered to be the primary reason behind the poor health condition of the people who live nearby. (Express Photo by Amit Chakravarty)

BMC’s decision comes nearly seven weeks after the The Indian Express launched it series “Death by Breath” on October 19, which revealed how rising pollution levels in Mumbai over the years has exposed its people, particularly young children, to health hazards with adverse long-term consequences.

One of the reports under the series on October 25 highlighted how reckless garbage burning has been contributing to increased air pollution. The report also pointed out that one of the key aspects of solid waste management relates to segregation, given the increasing quantum of garbage collected by the civic body every year.

On the day this report was published, Deepak Kesarkar, guardian minister of Mumbai, told The Indian Express that a process of segregation of waste in the landfills is being chalked out.

About Deonar landfill

The Deonar landfill was set up in 1927 and is spread across 120 hectares of an open land parcel in the eastern suburbs of Mumbai. During the early 20th century, Shivaji Nagar, Mankhurd and Deonar areas didn’t have any human habitation and was considered to be the fag end of the megapolis. However, after independence, Mumbai recorded a huge influx of people coming from all parts of the country and human habitation started increasing exponentially in the suburban belt in the 1990s.

In the 2000s, informal housing mushroomed at Deonar, Mankhurd and Shivaji Nagar areas, as close proximity to the landfill ensured lower living cost and became one of the major residential hubs for the Low-Income Groups (LIGs).

As per CPCB, the introduction of plastic items in the 1970s changed the composition of urban waste. The inorganic waste material, along with hazardous metal waste, were dumped haphazardly in the landfills and with decades of unmonitored dumping, the landfill became the point source of pollution.

Today, the Deonar landfill is considered to be the primary reason behind the poor health condition of the people who live nearby. Also, the M/East (M/E) ward, which houses the landfill, has the lowest life expectancy rate in Mumbai.

The BMC’s tender document states that the landfill currently houses two crore cubic metres of waste. BMC’s Environment Status Report (ESR) states that on a daily basis, 500-700 tonnes of solid waste is being dumped in the landfill.

In 2022-23, BMC collected an average of 6,385 metric tonne a day (MTD) garbage from its 24 municipal wards, 15 per cent more than 2021-’22. A major proportion of this waste is sent to BMC’s Kanjurmarg waste facility where 4,500 to 5,500 metric tonnes of waste is processed per day scientifically through bio-reactor technology and windrow composting. The remaining waste is sent to the Deonar landfill.

The ESR report also states that 72.6 per cent of the total waste produced in Mumbai is organic food waste, while 17 per cent comprises sand, stone and fine particles. Around 3.5 per cent comprises organic dry waste such as wood and cloth, while items such as plastic, recyclable metals and papers contribute to 6.5 per cent.

Rishi Aggarwal, director of Mumbai Sustainability Center, told The Indian Express, “Food waste gets decomposed easily, generating methane gas and heat, due to which the landfills easily catch fire, polluting the air. The whole process could be easily avoided if the BMC takes the route of setting up bio-methanation plants or CNG units in their dumpyards. This would help not only in processing the waste but will also generate usable energy,” Aggarwal said.

Waste characterisation

Civic officials said that the process of characterisation will involve excavating the existing heap of garbage mountain to extract samples from it. A senior official from the solid waste management department said that the entire work will be done through a process of compartmentalisation.
First, the entire garbage mountain will be divided into five different zones and around 50 bore-holes will be created in various points of the garbage mountain.

“The dumping ground consists of both fresh waste that is being dumped regularly and aged waste lying beneath for decades. With the help of bores, we will extract samples from different levels of the pile and test them in accredited laboratories,” said the official.

Officials said the different types of waste includes sand soil, sand, textile waste, plastic waste and hazardous waste components, including fertilisers and scrapped electrical gadgets. After samples are tested, there will be clarity on the proportion of organic and inorganic waste present in the dumping ground.

“Since the landfill has existed for more than 90 years, it is possible that the maximum proportion of waste is organic and they have already been decomposed. The quantum of inorganic waste came into existence only after the 1980s, following the introduction of plastic packaging,” the official said.

Civic officials said that after the entire quantum of legacy waste is identified, it will start the process of bio-mining, which will recover the entire landfill from its pile of garbage.

The BMC’s tender document states that the process of waste characterisation will cost around Rs 1.13 crore and will take around two months for the BMC to complete the process.