Application of GIS in Landfill Siting for Municipal Solid Waste

Uncontrolled growth of the urban population in developing countries in recent years has made solid waste management an important issue. Today municipal solid waste management (MSWM) is one of the most challenging issues in urban cities, which are facing a serious pollution problem due to the generation of huge quantities of solid waste. This results in development of environmentally sustainable and efficient waste management systems. The main objective of MSWM is to protect the health of the population, maintain environmental quality by promoting sustainable practices, which in turn would provide support to economic productivity. Sanitary landfill constitutes one of the primary methods of municipal solid waste disposal. Selecting a environmentally acceptable landfill site is a complex land use planning problem involving the collection and processing of the information that relates to environmental, socio-economic as well as socio-political issues. It also requires an extensive evaluation process in order to identify the optimum available disposal location. This paper presents a method based on Geographical Information Systems (GIS) modeling to identify a set of criteria which needs to be considered for the proposed MSW landfill site in the city. GIS technology is used to generate spatial data for site assessment. The digitization and analysis of the thematic maps were performed using GIS software. Supervised classification was done to depict the land use in accordance with SWM. Several factors were considered in the siting process including geology, water resources, land use, sensitive sites, air quality and groundwater quality. Debishree Khan & S.R. Samadder 38