Vigil at landfill sites essential: Baijal

NEW DELHI: Dust control at project sites, use of non-potable water for the greening of pillars and vigil at landfill sites should become essential, asserted LG Anil Baijal after a meeting with the Delhi government and the civic agencies. “Our goal is to make a clean and Green Delhi,” said the LG.

Earlier, the CPCB made a plan of monitoring the landfill sites. The LG and the Delhi government will follow the plan. In early September, the CPCB released ‘Odour Monitoring and Management in Urban Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) Landfill Sites', nine years after it first came up with guidelines calling for “accurate, precise and acceptable” measurement of odour, and a need to come up with a database of information to capture the magnitude of odour pollution.

The Centre's Solid Waste Management Rules, 2016, identified odour as a “public nuisance”. The CPCB official said the standards in place are all laid down by foreign countries. “These are not applicable to India since the characteristics of the garbage are very different here,” he said. “This is the first step to even understand how to go about measuring and understanding odour pollution.”

The 2017 guidelines use East Delhi's Ghazipur landfill site as a “pilot study”, “which recognises the diverse climatic zones of our vast country, hence odour surveys at MSW landfill sites cannot be generalised but to be assessed on a case-to-case basis, taking into account the unique regional — temporal and spatial influences of each MSW landfill site,” the guidelines note. The LG has also met the authorities of all the civic bodies and asked them to monitor the landfill sites.