Bioremediation for solid waste management and disposal in our cities

 Most Indian cities are surrounded by hills of garbage, which are a testimony to India’s neglect over a long period of managing and disposing of the waste it generates in the course of its household activities and commercial activities in the cities.

Even after the Municipal Solid Waste (Management and Handling) Rules, 2000 specified that landfill sites should be allocated on which sanitary landfills should be developed to receive the final residual waste, the sites have been used only as open dumpsites for all kinds of waste, mixed together.

Why bioremediation is necessary:- 

• Solid-waste management is a major challenge in urban areas throughout the world.
• Without an effective and efficient solid-waste management program, the waste generated from various human activities, can result in health hazards and have a negative impact on the environment.
• Continuously and uncontrolled discharge of industrial and urban wastes into the environmental sink has become an issue of major global concern
• The industrial and anthropogenic activities had also led to the contamination of agricultural lands which results the loss of biodiversity.
• Although the use of pesticides, herbicides increases the productivity of crop but also increase the contamination in the soil, water and air 

Limitations and disadvantages of capping of landfill sites:-

• Capping is successful only when the landfills have a certain height which has been already crossed in most of the landfills
• It requires proper scientific designing and construction in the absence of which the structure faces the same problems as open dump sites- leakage of gases, foul smell, leachate etc.

Bioremediation:-

• Bioremediation is not only a process of removing the pollutant from the environment but also it an eco-friendly and more effective process
• The pollutants can be removes or detoxify from the soil and water by the use of microorganism, known as bioremediation
• The purpose of bioremediation is to make environment free from pollution with help of environmental friendly microbes.
• Bio-remediation and bio-mining are clearly specified as the first choice under Rules for the Safe Treatment of Legacy Waste in all open dumpsites and existing operational dumpsites in India.

Advantages :-

• The contaminations of soil through heavy metals become a major problem among all other environmental problems.
• These metals can also be removed by the use of various biological agents like yeast, fungi, bacteria, and algae etc. which act as bio sorbent for sequestering the metals.

In solid waste, about 12% constitute of rubber. A rubber can neither degrade easily nor recycled due to its physical composition. This can be removed due to bioremediation.
Bioremediation of Agricultural Waste

• Each year, human, livestock, and crops produce approximately 38 billion metric tons of organic waste worldwide. Disposal and environmental friendly management of these wastes has become a global priority.these can be managed through vermicomposting
• A vermicomposting is nothing but a joint action between the earth warms and microorganism. Here microorganism helps in degradation of organic matter and earth warm drives the process and conditioning to the substrate and altering the biological activity.
• It leads to near-zero emission of harmful gases (such as methane, hydrogen sulphide, and ammonia) and leachate
• Organic fraction of the original waste is degraded biologically by the bioculture.
• Specific microbes are also used for leachate treatment.Once the waste is stabilised, it is ready for bio-mining, and can be separated into different fractions which can then be used for different purposes — for compost, road subgrade, making RDF (Refuse Derived Fuel) pellets, recycling plastics, or inert for landfills etc.
• The major advantage of the bioremediation methods is that it allows for contamination to be treated, neutralized or removed and then produces a waste product itself that is more easily disposed of.
• In some cases, there is no need for disposal at all. In the case of the plants used in phytoremediation and rhizofiltration, the plant is able to do something called bioaccumulation. This means is holds onto the contaminant. As the plant is still growing, there is no need to remove and destroy it.

By: SONAM SHEORAN