A biomining project to clear legacy waste from Dhapa that started in 2019 has stopped midway, leaving incomplete the task of chipping tall hillocks of waste that have accumulated over decades.

Only about 30 per cent of legacy waste has been cleared, Debabrata Majumdar, the mayoral council member heading the solid waste management department of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC), said.

A Gujarat-based company was handed the task to remove legacy waste from 60 acres in the Dhapa dumping ground in 2019, said a KMC official. The work was supposed to be over by June 2024, but only about 20 acres had been cleared of waste when the deadline ended. “We terminated the contract with the company,” said an official.

“The biomining project at Dhapa has been discontinued. We were not happy with the pace as well as the quality of work of the company that was engaged to remove the legacy waste. We will hire someone else to do the remaining job,” Majumdar said at the monthly council meeting of all councillors at the KMC headquarters on Friday.

Biomining is mining legacy waste for items that can be recycled. This reduces the volume of waste.

Large and tall hillocks of waste, much like Howrah where a landslide last month wreaked havoc, exist in Dhapa. In Howrah, the landslide cracked the soil, broke water supply and sewerage lines and stopped water supply along large parts for a few days.

The biomining work at Dhapa was meant to clear waste and reclaim a portion of the land where a new engineered landfill site is supposed to come up.

“We had plans to reclaim the land and set up an engineered landfill facility there. The delay in completing the biomining project has completely disrupted our plans,” said the official.

An engineered landfill facility is different from the open dumping ground now present across cities in Bengal or in most of India. There are several layers built on the ground in an engineered landfill site to prevent the leachate from waste percolate down and contaminate the underground water.

The dumping grounds at Dhapa or Howrah’s Belgachhia are all open dumping grounds, where no such prevention mechanism is present.

Bengal’s only engineered landfill site is present in Hooghly’s Baidyabati.

The engineered landfill facility also has pipes installed to catch the methane gas generated from heaps of waste.

Majumdar tried to sound hopeful and said that an engineered landfill facility will be created by the KMC within a year. He did not go into the details of how it would be achieved.