Mumbai (AsiaNews/Agencies) - It's alarm waste in Mumbai. In the metropolis - financial capital of India and ninth most populous city in the world - an area nearly the size of New York's Central Park is occupied by mountains of trash.
A prime real estate that could be redeveloped to housing 6.5 million people - half of Mumbai's population - who live in slums without basic sanitation and safe drinking water.
Every day the peninsula discards 11,000 metric tons of refuse in three dump yards, that together occupy more than 750 acres. At going market rates, that land would be worth as much as $4.4 billion if it were sold and used for housing.
The Deonar dump site, Asia’s biggest and arguably oldest that opened in 1927, sits on 326 acres in eastern Mumbai and takes half of the city’s daily refuse. Its trash mountain is so high it could bury the White House - twice over.
A smaller landfill in Mulund occupies about 62 acres while a 353-acre one is further north in Kanjurmarg. Initially on the outskirts of Mumbai, the landfills over time got incorporated into the city limits and now occupy expensive, strategic real estate. Even because of the connectivity to the downtown area by rail and highway.
Yet the land, if redeveloped, must price in a steep discount, as it would take years of cleanup and land preparation before anything could be built on it.
Many children accompany their parents into the dump to pick through the waste and scavenge for recyclables to sell. They frequently get boils, sores and respiratory ailments.
Most Indian households don’t separate garbage for recycling. What reaches the landfill is a mix of kitchen refuse, plastic, glass, paper, metal and construction debris, requiring hundreds of waste pickers to trawl through it. Separated garbage would result in less mass and require less space.
The real challenge in redeveloping dump yards, according to CBRE’s Magazine, is the “huge upfront capital” needed to clean the land, make it safe for habitation and then build sewage, water and electricity lines.
Redeveloping dump yards wouldn’t just free up space to build homes, it would mean more roads, parks or hospitals in a city with already-burdened infrastructure.
