Spatio-temporal estimates of solid waste disposal in an urban city of India: A remote sensing and GIS approach

Abstract The landfilling method is one of the best method of final disposal / treatment of solid waste globally. In India, 68.8-million-ton year solid waste are generated and 35% of the solid waste is generally sent to landfills only. By using vector data and remote sensing (RS), the rank algorithm is proposed in this study for identification of possible landfill sites and its expansion in Coimbatore, south India, where 75% of municipal solid waste are dumped without treatment. From the study, it is observed that 17% of the study area was identified as good, moderate and least or unsuitable for landfill expansion. Polygon 6, representing grazing/ agriculture land, is found to be most appropriate for the landfill expansion according to standard deviation from normalized indices, it is ranked 3rd among the 24 polygons in the target area. From this study, it is observed that 25% of the polygons were least suitable and 29% of the total target area was found to more suitable for landfill expansion, as per standard deviation. This method provides comparable results with other decision-making tools. The proposed method is purely based on RS and vector data, moreover its very flexible and if so desired, it can be used by policy makers.