MCG fills up leachate ponds to build treatment plant in Bandhwari

The Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (MCG) has begun filling three leachate ponds at the Bandhwari landfill site to construct a waste-to-energy (WTE) plant. However, environmentalists claimed that the agencies and MCG were permanently discharging excess leachate into the forest, posing an environmental hazard and a threat to the wildlife in the area.

A leachate pond is a body of water in which leachate — water dissolved with contaminants — is collected and held. There are seven in Bandwari: five at the landfill site and two elsewhere.

According to Naresh Kumar, joint commissioner of MCG, there are approximately 200,000 metric tonnes of legacy waste and about 15,000 to 20,000 cubic metres of leachate at the landfill site that must be cleared in order to establish the waste-to-energy plant.

“We will ensure no leachate is discharged in the forest area, and teams have been formed to monitor things closely. However, it is not possible to make the surface and begin construction for the WTE plant without filling the leachate ponds, so we have begun the process. To resolve the issue, we will also build two more units in Bandhwari to increase the plant’s capacity to treat all the leachate collected at the site,” said Kumar on Tuesday.

Construction will be carried out by Ecogreen Energy, an MCG concessionaire, once the area has been cleared and the surface is ready, according to MCG officials. The plant is scheduled to open in December 2024. Officials said the leachate would be stored in the remaining ponds and denied any discharge into the forest.

The units, known as disc tube and reverse osmosis (DTRO) units, will be purchased from the environmental compensation fund established by the Haryana government in response to pollution near the Bandhwari waste plant.

“At the Bandhwari site, three existing units (a leachate treatment plant and two DTROs) can process 550 KLD (kilo litres per day) of waste. There are currently seven ponds that can hold up to 36,000 KLD leachate. This capacity is normally sufficient for daily leachate generation, but additional units are required to treat rainy-season leachate and legacy leachate. The two new DTRO units will boost treatment capacity to 950 KLD,” said Kumar.

Ecogreen Energy’s spokesperson said construction will begin once the land is available to them. “At the moment, MCG has hired contractors to do bio-mining work. At the WTE site, two leachate ponds are currently being filled, and two more ponds will be filled later,” said the spokesperson.

Each leachate pond, according to officials, has a capacity of 6,000-8,000 cubic metres. “Three leachate ponds outside the WTE plant area will remain in place and will be used to store leachate in the future,” the spokesperson said.

Kumar said they have hired contractors for legacy waste bio-mining at various locations throughout the landfill. “It is the responsibility of the respective contractors to collect, treat, and dispose of leachate generated from the respective areas,” he said.

According to Vaishali Chandra Rana, a Gurugram-based environmentalist, if MCG is filling up the leachate ponds inside the landfill, they should assume that the excess leachate will be slyly discharged in the forest by MCG. “On March 2, we caught them discharging hundreds of thousands of litres of leachate into the forest despite there being no rain. However, during the monsoon, one can imagine the ground situation. Incredibly, the forest and wildlife departments are sleeping on this,” she said.

MCG, according to Rana, is building and fencing on two acres of Aravallis adjacent to the Bandhwari landfill, right next to a wildlife waterhole measuring approximately 2.5 acres in size. “Many dead animals have been discovered inside the Bandhwari leachate pool, and similar carcasses have been discovered in and around the leachate-contaminated waterhole directly behind the landfill. On March 2, we reported to the National Green Tribunal and senior officials that leachate was being deliberately discharged in the Aravallis forest and in the same waterhole where they had discharged previously,” she said.