Leachate Treatment in India

Image by Sustainable sanitation via Flickr

The continuing poor management of landfills in India is a disgrace, so it is no surprise that although we have seen evidence that there is growing interest in the scientific application of good leachate treatment practice in India, it would seldom be possible to apply it, given the unscientific way in which so called "landfills" (dumps?) are currently engineered and managed.

The following is an extract from an article on 24 April of this year (this month) on which I rest my case, since it is based upon the wealthy capital city of the nation:

Delhi government calls its three garbage dumps at Ghazipur, Okhla and Bhalswa landfills. In reality, they are far from what a landfill should be. These are monstrous trash mountains, including hazardous waste, leaching out toxic liquids and emanating noxious fumes. Thousands of scavenging birds swarm over them as they grow larger every day.

The situation could have been different had the corporations given more thought to managing them. Ask any waste picker who scavenges on these dump yards about why this waste could have been a treasure...
...there are hundreds of waste pickers who pick up whatever they can without using masks, gloves or any other protection. Some even tie a magnet to a long stick to pull up metal objects.
 Credits: Capital dumps a fortune at its landfills - Times of India
 

In my opinion the provision of proper waste disposal facilities should be on the very top of the agenda as any nation industrializes and becomes more wealthy. If India cannot devote just a small amount of it additional wealth which has been accruing at a historically uniquely rapid rate for more than the last ten years, then it is a failing state.

To deny pickers the ability to make a living can be an evil, but so many other nations (including many of lesser wealth) have found a way to recycle waste in a way that provides jobs for the local community without recourse to the life threatening and certainly extremely unhealthy practice of "picking".



At the same time, it has been possible to provide reliable leachate treatment and disposal once the landfills are properly managed and built in accordance with good sanitary landfill practices as have been acheived in the majority of nations around the world.

Providing successful leachate treatment plant designs in India, for the old existing dumps is an impossible task. That is because the prediction of leachate quality is rendered from scientific capability to a matter of guesswork by a lack of data and controls, and this is made even worse by India's monsoon climate which means that any leachate treatment plant needs to be able to run at almost no flow in the dry periods and very quickly at the start of each monsoon be able to treat it's maximum design flows.

As the most effective, and lowest cost forms of leachate treatment rely on biological processes and these cannot be quickly switched on therein lies another problem for leachate treatment in India.

Then finally, any leachate treatment plant designer for Indian landfills will discover that the water quality that the Indian government's own rules require the leachate to be treated to, are as strict, or require higher water quality after treatment, than even many authorities require in the wealthiest industrialized nations.

Unfortunately, waste management and especially landfill methods don't seem to get any better in India, despite increased wealth. They won't be able to do so, until the central Indian government revises the rules and makes them realistic, less strict but much better value for money, and appropriate to what the municipalities can afford to spend.

The 80/20 rule should be adopted, at least to start with for all future leachate treatment projects because by reducing the specifications for final water quality and using innovative solutions Indian landfill operators should be looking to spend 20% of the cost they are being quoted currently for leachate treatment plants for 80% of the treatment quality, and that treated quality would be good enough for the local rivers for the health of the rivers to which the leachate plants discharge, and for those using the water from them.