Site Suitability for Urban Solid Waste Disposal Using Geoinformatics: A Case Study of Pune Municipal Corporation, Maharashtra, India

Urban solid waste disposal is a major problem, faced by majority of cities or towns in the world. Rapidly increasing population growth, urbanization, industrialization and rural to urban migration created acute problem of solid waste management. Solid waste per capita generation rate in India has increased from 0.44 kg per day in 2001 to 0.5 kg per day in 2011. These increasing rates of waste generation stress on all infrastructural, natural and budgetary resources with adverse impacts on human health and environment due to the improper and unscientific solid waste dumping. Pune is one of the fastest growing city, it generates total quantity of waste is about 1300 to 1400 metric tons per day. So, there is need suitable solid waste disposal sites for prevention of environment. The present research work to find out the suitable solid waste dumping sites using Geoinformatics approach for Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC). For this purpose topographical maps and medium resolution satellite data were used to generate various thematic layers. Site suitability analysis for urban solid waste disposal consider the nine parameters such as, road network, rivers, lakes, canals, geology, population density, slope, airport and land use/land cover. The generated thematic maps of these criteria were standardized using multi-criteria analysis method. A weight for each criterion was generated by comparing them with each other according to their importance. With the help of these weights and criteria final site suitability map was prepared. This site suitability map presented in four suitability level such as highly suitable, moderate suitable, less suitable and unsuitable. The result shows that around 1.70 % area is under high suitable for solid waste disposal site, 7.86 % is moderate suitable, 80.92 % of study area is less and 9.52 % area is unsuitable for dumping site. There are ten potential site have been determine based on sitting criteria and all sites are identify surrounding part of city area within newly added 34 villages. The suggested potential sites are economically and environmentally suitable for solid waste dumping.