GIS supported solid waste management in coastal areas

Planning of solid waste management (SWM) facilities in terrestrial as well as coastal areas addresses several situations, and requires considering numerous factors. This leads to large amounts of data and information that must be organized and analyzed. However, in many SWM systems, all of the relevant information cannot be managed properly due to insufficiencies in methods/tools and/or resources. To assist the solid waste decision making process, GIS-based decision support systems can be applied to deal with the multi-attribute and spatial nature of SWM systems. In this study, the application potential of GIS based decision support systems to functional elements of the SWM system are reviewed first. Then particular emphasis is given to landfill site selection. In this context, landfill siting process and key siting criteria were developed to incorporate the environmental, socio-political, engineering, and economic factors for an appropriate solution. To aid decision makers to determine landfill area requirements, an area estimation model, containing population projection and waste quantity forecasting modules, was developed in Visual Basic. Following the development of a graphical user interface, suitable areas for proposed landfill were determined in an IDRISI environment.