They tower above Delhi like monstrous mountains, feasted upon by birds, flies, vermin and cows, and emitting an inescapable stench of rot. These “trash mountains” loom so large – several miles wide and more than 200ft (60 metres) high – that they are visible from across the city.
The rubbish dumps, located in the neighbourhoods of Ghazipur, Bhalswa and Okhla, are where more than 10,000 tonnes of Delhi’s waste ends up every day: everything from vegetable peelings to glass bottles, plastic packaging, batteries, broken toys and discarded clothes.
Delhi residents, who frequently breathe the world’s worst-quality air, widely view these dumpsites as apocalyptic places, dark monuments to the city’s failures to deal with the mounting problem of rubbish and pollution.
Yet the true menace of Delhi’s towering rubbish dumps is one that is largely invisible. Satellite data shared exclusively with the Guardian indicates that the landfills of India’s capital city have become a global hotspot for emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that traps 82 times more heat than carbon dioxide over 20 years.
According to the data from Kayrros, an environmental intelligence agency, Ghazipur, Bhalswa and Okhla have been home to at least 124 methane “super emitter” leaks since 2020.
Due to the widespread culture of cooking using fresh produce, an unusually high proportion of the waste generated in India is “wet waste”, such as food scraps and vegetable peelings. More than 50% of the rubbish dumped daily in Ghazipur, Bhalswa and Okhla is biodegradable.
With no strictly implemented system of rubbish segregation in Delhi – a city of 32 million people – the wet waste is mostly unsegregated and left to rot. As it decomposes, it generates huge amounts of methane. At the Ghazipur, Bhalswa and Okhla sites, there is no system of gas capture, a method commonly used in developed countries, meaning the methane is free to rise into the atmosphere.
“Delhi has very poor waste segregation levels, especially for wet waste,” said Bharati Chaturvedi, founder and director of the Chintan environmental research and action group, which works on sustainable waste management issues in India. “As soon as it ends up on a landfill, the municipality is stuck: there’s nothing that can be done to stop it producing methane, which then causes all these fires and pollution.”
She added: “Even the simplest measures for reducing methane are not put in place in Delhi. We need to be composting this waste on a large scale but one big problem is that there’s no land to do it. There’s also no market for compost, so there’s no financial incentive to do anything other than dump organic waste.”
read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/12/delhi-india-rubbish-dumps-sky-high-methane-emissions
further reading: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/12/revealed-the-1200-big-methane-leaks-from-waste-dumps-trashing-the-planet