New Delhi: The garbage mountain at Okhla will be flattened by Dec, LG VK Saxena said, citing an agency hired for biomining of waste at the landfill, according to an MCD statement on Friday. Saxena, accompanied by CM Rekha Gupta, South Delhi MP Ramvir Singh Bidhuri, and mayor Raja Iqbal Singh, launched the planting of 8,000 bamboo saplings on a patch of land cleared by biomining of waste at the Okhla landfill.“LG said that the agency doing biomining work at the Okhla landfill site has said that the work will be completed at this site by Dec this year and this landfill site will be flattened,” said the statement from MCD. LG, however, asked the agency to complete the work two months before the deadline. CM Gupta claimed that due to the failure of the previous regime, people were forced to live amid garbage dumps, but her govt was committed to removing all three garbage mountains in the city. She said Delhi generated 11,000 tonnes of garbage every day, but only 7,000 tonnes was processed, and 4,000 tonnes got accumulated at the landfills, leading to the problem of legacy waste.In order to solve this issue, govt is setting up two new waste-to-energy plants and enhancing the capacity of the two existing ones. This would help increase the waste processing capacity from the current 7,000 tonnes per day to 15,000 per day. Around 8,000 saplings of two varieties of bamboo saplings, along with 8,000 saplings of lemongrass and vetiver, will be planted at the Okhla landfill, the MCD statement said.LG said that in the last three years, 1,70,000 bamboo saplings had been planted in Delhi. Bamboo plants release 30% more oxygen and grow faster than other plants.
