A CASE STUDY ON CHARACTERISTICS OF SOLID WASTE & LEACHATE TREATMENT OF OKHLA LANDFILL-NEW DELHI

Sunita Bansal, Srijit Biswas

Abstract: Delhi is the most densely populated and urbanized city of India. The annual growth rate in population during the last decade was almost double the national average. Delhi is also a commercial hub, providing employment opportunities and accelerating the pace of urbanization, resulting in a corresponding increase in municipal solid waste (MSW) generation. Presently Delhi generating about 6500 tonnes/day of MSW out of which only 70-75% wastes are able to collect by the MSW management authority and rest amount of wastes are not possible to collect for the habit of people to thrown the wastes in empty places. At present three main landfill sites of Delhi are Bhalaswa at north Delhi, Ghazipur at east Delhi, and Okhla at south Delhi. But not a single landfill are sanitary landfill rather wastes are dumping crudely as a heap of wastes in open landfill. As a result the leachate generated due to percolation of rain water and squeezing of wastes itself posing a great threat in the surrounding soil structure of the landfill. Around the periphery of landfill, soils gets highly contaminated and toxic and degraded it’s essential nutrients [4,6]. In this paper a case study on characteristics of solid wastes of Okhla landfill and performance of it’s leachate treatment is carried out for future planning and proper management of soil structure around the periphery of landfill site.

Keywords: BOD, COD, E-coli, leachate, solid waste, TDS, etc

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2015.0402022