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Ramesh did give voice to city's waste worries 9 Jul 2009, 2336 hrs IST, Ruhi Bhasin & Neha Lalchandani, TNN

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NEW DELHI: Environment minister Jairam Ramesh may be against a blanket ban on plastic bags but he did raise an important concern of the city when he mentioned its poor waste management practices. Chief minister Sheila Dikshit accepted on Thursday that waste management in the city was in a mess. The city's three landfill sites have been overflowing for quite sometime now, but despite several plans and proposals, very little has materialised. Delhi produces 9,000 MT of waste daily which is expected to increase to 14,000 MT by 2014. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) spends about Rs 760 crore on its management with no results to show. The agency came out with a master plan for solid waste management in December 2007 but hasn't progressed beyond that. MCD confesses that even if all its proposed projects are in place soon, it will be able to process only 66.07% of the waste by 2014. At present, door-to-door segregation, which has yet to be implemented, is the main idea. The process of getting things in place has also been rather slow. "We started work on the master plan in 2007 but many of our projects like the waste-to-energy plants and plasma technology are likely to take more time to work out. Problems also arose with the three new landfill sites. Bhatti Mines is awaiting environmental clearance while those at Jaitpur and Narela-Bawana have been facing resistance from locals,'' said a senior MCD official. However, with MCD already having attempted and failed at waste segregation, it remains to be seen how well this project will work. With the three landfill sites set to be closed by November this year, there is serious concern about future disposal of waste in the city. Incineration has neither worked well, nor has it been accepted by environmentalists and residents. "Incineration, whether to derive energy or by use of plasma technology, leads to a lot of emissions. We are not equipped to deal with that. The quality of our waste is also different,'' said a senior government official. The civic agency is now looking at converting waste dumped at landfill sites into bales, storing them and re-using the sites. Said a senior MCD official: "We are looking at using a technology from Sweden through which waste dumped at landfill sites will be compressed mechanically and made into bales. These bales will be covered by an air-tight material to prevent foul smell and bird menace in the area. The garbage will occupy one-third less space and will be stored elsewhere.'' This will take care of 500-1000 MT of waste.