Bio Mining : Plan to flatten landfills in New Delhi delayed due to heavy rain
At the beginning of this year New Delhi announced that it had comissioned three municipal corporations to flatten its major landfills, Ghazipur, Bhalswa and Okhla, until September 2024. The plan was to clear one landfill each year. But from the beginning the corporations pointed at various problems, such as an extreme shortage of space for disposing off inert material recovered after bio mining, breakdowns of machines and delays during winter- and monsoon season. Right now heavy monsoon-rainfalls have halted work. A delay of at least two months is expected.
The corporations work with trommel machines that separate various components of legacy waste such as cloth, paper, plastic, sand and bricks. The old legacy waste is fed into the main trommel through a conveyor belt and is transported to a cylindrical rotating sieve while air is blown from one end to the other. Heavy materials such as soil and stones fall closer through the cylindrical sieve while lighter components like plastic and paper fall at the farthest end. The various components can also be separated based on varying size or sieves in the trommel machine. But waste cannot be sieved when wet. The corporations hope to start bio mining as soon as possible.