An Integrated Solid Waste Management (ISWM) Plan Using Google Earth and Linear Programming: A Case Study of Kharagpur City, West Bengal

Solid Waste Management (SWM) is an obligatory function of the urban local bodies (ULBs) such as a municipality. Today, ULBs in developing countries like India are creating new infrastructure for better SWM and are trying to change old and unsustainable practices. A major issue in current SWM practices in developing nations is availability of timely data and financial resources. Remote Sensing (RS) and GIS can be used together to develop an integrated solid waste management plan since RS provides spatial and temporal data readily in the form of satellite images available on the Internet and GIS allows mapping with overlays of population distribution, for locating bins, vehicle routing and facility siting. A major advantage of using RS and GIS is that they can provide accurate, inexpensive, wide-ranging and rapid results which can be further combined with other tools like linear programming. This approach has been used for various applications in several cities around the world and was reviewed by Dutta and Goel (2017).