Gurugram: Legacy waste disposal process at Bandhwari likely to miss June target
Despite regular monitoring by the National Green Tribunal (NGT), the Municipal Corporation, Gurugram (MCG), has failed to effectively manage and reduce its legacy waste, which has been accumulated over the years on the Bandhwari landfill site posing severe risks to human health and environment.
The waste on the landfill site increased from 8.84 lakh MT as on December 31, 2024 to 11.32 lakh MT as on March 31, 2025. In the month of April, only 45,000 MT of waste has been processed.
The MCG has hired two private agencies to scientifically process and clear the legacy waste of 8.84 lakh MT in four months, however, the way these companies are working at snail’s pace indicates that they would not be able to complete their targets to process and clear the legacy waste by June 30 this year.
Vinay Mohan, plant manager of the Greentech Company hired to clear the legacy waste, while talking to The Tribune said they had installed 10 machines (including trommels) while the other company, Adarsh Bharat, had installed 13 trommel machines at the landfill but they all were not working to their full capacity.
He said the main reason was that the waste had high humidity content due to the dumping of fresh waste, which had buried the legacy waste under it. “The machines are not adapted to process the wet waste. They need dry material to run in full capacity,” he said.
Last week, these machines were running to just 10 per cent of their capacity. They, all combined, were processing just 2,000 MT of waste per day instead of their full capacity to process 20,000 MT per day because of high humidity content.
Moreover, the recent fire incident on the landfill has for the time being temporally stopped the work of processing the waste, thus creating more problems for the civic body.
More than 100 fire tenders used to douse the fire have further increased the humidity content, forcing all the machines to halt their operations temporarily, Vinay Mohan said, adding that it would take some time to resume the work.
Further, he said they wanted to install few more machines to speed up the work but there was hardly any space for the purpose. “We have requested the MC authorities to provide us additional space to install more trommel machines,” he said.
Both Greentech and Adarsh Bharat companies have also requested the MCG authorities to dump fresh waste at separate pockets on the landfill so that it doesn’t affect the disposal of legacy waste.
Another big problem for the processing companies is the extraction of about 50 per cent RDF (refuse-derived fuel) from the processing of the waste. The Greentech Company is transporting this RDF to a paper mill at Muzaffarnagar in UP. The plant capacity of this mill is less and also has storage issues. As such, the RDF is lifted and transported slowly.
“We will soon tie-up with a waste-to-energy plant at Sonepat and then transport all the RDF to it. It will solve this issue to a great extent,” the Greentech official added.
Delhi