A gigantic pile of garbage in India is set to overtake the Taj Mahal in size over the next twelve months.
Described as India’s ‘Mount Everest of trash’, it measures over 65m (213) feet in height and officials have said it will need to have warning lights installed to stop aircraft colliding with it.
The Ghazipur landfill first opened in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India in 1984 and hit capacity in 2002. Nowadays, the 21 million people of New Delhi rely on this gigantic pile of fetid waste every single day.
‘About 2,000 tonnes of garbage is dumped at Ghazipur each day,’ a Delhi municipal official told the Associated Free Press on condition of anonymity.
The mountain of rubbish is more than just a sticking, rotting eyesore – last year a landslide occurred as a result of heavy rains, killing two people.
Following the incident, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conducted a report into the site.
‘Waste disposal practices are not well controlled which has led to the formation of steep and unstable slopes,’ they concluded. ‘Subsurface fires, smoke emissions from the surface of the waste, animals scavenging waste, and informal sector waste recyclers were all observed during the November 2017 site visit.’
According to residents, breathing anywhere near the dump is almost impossible because of the methane fumes leaking into the atmosphere. Often these fumes can be sparked into fires that take days to extinguish.
‘It all needs to be stopped as the continuous dumping has severely polluted the air and ground water,’ Chitra Mukherjee, the head of Chintan, an environment advocacy group, told the AFP.
Indian cities are responsible for millions of tonnes of waste each year and the dumping is only predicted to get bigger as Indian citizens consume, and therefore dispose of, more items.
A petition to clean up the Ghazipur landfill has gained 17,000 signatures.
‘The stench of rotting waste is releasing poisonous gases making everyone sick,’ reads the petition.
‘We can’t even open our windows without vomiting. The toxic air has ruined our air purifiers and caused pipe leakages. Think of what it is doing to our bodies. It’s been 17 years since Ghazipur ran out of space and should have been shut down but the trucks continue to dump waste there.’
‘We have started this petition because we are sick of falling sick. We are sick of the inaction by authorities. We had given up all hope until we read about an IAS officer in Indore who was covered by the media for clearing up a similar but much smaller landfill under his jurisdiction in 6 months!’
‘Help us green this landfill which is not only a health hazard for us citizens, but a blot on the global image of our national capital Delhi.’
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