KC Hariharan lives in one of Mumbai’s oldest planned localities: Mulund. The property boom in the last decade and a half transformed the northern suburb into an economic hub. It’s an important junction in the suburban train network, and will soon be linked with metro rail. But Hariharan’s family has spent nearly 14 years amid an inescapable stench.
The city’s third-biggest garbage dump is barely a kilometre away from the family’s apartment. For 52 years, trucks piled waste onto heaps that are now up to 30 metres high and cover an area as big as 40 football fields. That’s nearly 72 lakh metric tonnes of food, paper, wood, clothes, plastic bottles, tin cans, metal and everything else that the city’s residents didn’t need anymore—nearly enough to fill garbage trucks lined up along India’s 7,500-kilometre-long coastline.
Air in the evenings would often turn toxic, Hariharan said, as someone would set towers of waste afire. “Monsoons were worse,” the 59-year-old man said, as roaches to ants multiplied faster. They had to call pest-control every 45 days instead of once every four months or so.
Hariharan, a director in a logistics firm, hopes for a better future now. The municipal corporation shut the landfill last October. Better still, it has started clearing the refuse to reclaim the land through biomining.
The Brihanmumbai Corporation in December began sprinkling microorganisms. That would help decompose organic material faster, while leftover rubber, glass, metal or plastic would be carted out for recycling. The 24-hectare space could be converted into a green lungspace.
The waste-to-green-cover metamorphosis may become a model for India, which according to government estimates, generates nearly 62 million tonnes of waste annually—most of which is disposed of untreated. Some change is afoot. Municipal corporations of Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Tiruchirappalli and Vijayawada have started using biomining, and are finding uses for the biodegradable and non-perishable waste retrieved. For Mumbai, that would be encouraging as the city’s nearly 20-million people generate nearly 7,000 metric tonnes of waste every day that is trucked to the two largest dumps in Deonar and Kanjurmarg.
Excavators scoop up garbage into mounds, which are then sprayed with a mixture of fungi and bacteria. That accelerates composting. Once the heap shrinks in size, the waste is fed into a separator that sorts organic material from non-biodegradable refuse. The municipal corporation intends to create such 20-22 modules to speed up work.
“There are mainly two types of products that are obtained after segregation—soil conditioner and recyclable materials like plastic, rubber, metal and glass,” Sunil Pawar, director of Bio-Mining India Pvt. Ltd., which is executing the project, told BloombergQuint. “Soil conditioner can be used for gardening, road development around Mumbai.” He said they have already processed nearly 4 lakh metric tonnes of waste, of which 1.25 lakh tonnes have been segregated and are ready to be shipped out.
The BMC earmarked Rs 43 crore for the project in its 2019-20 budget and will increase its outlay in subsequent years.
Not The First Time
The corporation experimented with biomining twice before but didn’t get expected results. The pilot in 1991-92 at Chincholi dump in Malad didn’t succeed. The BMC eventually closed the landfill by covering it with soil after removing non-biodegradable waste. Today, a commercial centre with upscale shopping malls and office towers flourishes there.
The civic body tried it a second time at Gorai but eventually chose another technology to close it.
Biomining can be used on existing and closed dumping grounds, said Rishi Aggarwal, founder and director of the non-governmental organisation Mumbai Sustainability Centre. He said the Mahim-Dharavi landfill, which was converted into Mahim Nature Park, was closed by naturally transforming contaminants to less harmful forms. “The corporation should adopt a multi-pronged approach: reduce the waste going to dumps and reclaim land using biomining,” he told BloombergQuint. The land could be used as waste management facility, he said. “It’s important the BMC completes this project in time and sets a precedent.”
The municipal corporation has global successes to look up to. Nanjido, an island on River Han in South Korea that was used as a landfill for the country’s capital Seoul, was transformed into an ecological park in 2002. And biomining isn’t used for waste management alone. Chile, the world’s largest exporter of copper, uses microbes to process waste from mines to extract copper ore, boosting output.
Creating Green Spaces
Mumbai’s civic authority is considering a few options on how to use the reclaimed land. “We can use it for solid waste management facilities and to create more open spaces,” Ashok Khaire, deputy municipal commissioner at BMC, told BloombergQuint.
Prasad Shetty, urbanist and associate professor with School of Environment and Architecture, said it’s very important to close the Mulund dump scientifically. “The reclaimed ground can be developed as an urban green space.”
The project could boost realty prices in Mulund, which over the years emerged as a prime locality because of its proximity to the economic hubs of Powai, Thane and Navi-Mumbai. Apartments cost Rs 17,000-20,000 per square feet. That compares with the average rate of Rs 30,000 per square feet in Mumbai—the costliest in India, according to real-estate consultant Liases Foras.
“Because of dumping ground, the area was struggling to command the premium it deserved,” Pankaj Kapoor, managing director at Liases Foras, told BloombergQuint. “If this land is reclaimed, the area will see more takers.”
Hariharan hopes the project is completed. “The BMC said that reclamation would take six years, but we want it done much before. Our locality must shed the ‘naak-pakadna’ (“hold your nose” in Hindi) tag.”
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