Design of Municipal Solid Waste Storage and Collection system using Google Earth and Google Maps

Due to lack of data availability, designing an integrated municipal solid waste system is a big challenge for many urban areas in the developing and underdeveloped nations. But with the help of available and easily accessible Remote Sensing and Geographic information system (RS and GIS) tools, the efficiency of the municipal solid waste storage and collection system can be increased significantly. Google Earth Pro and Google Maps are easily accessible and freely available online RS and GIS tools which can be used for developing waste management systems and analysing their associated environmental impacts. In the present study a simple approach for developing waste collection system is shown which requires significantly less amount of data and easily accessible software’s. Guwahati city, India was selected as the study area in the present study and the study area mainly includes the commercial and residential areas of the city. By using basic population, per capita waste generation data and waste composition, appropriate bin sizes were calculated for the storage of segregated secondary municipal solid waste. Then by using Google Earth pro software bin location plan was prepared with the service areas of each bin. For drawing routes for waste collection, Google Earth pro software was used with manual vehicle routing approach. For choosing appropriate time for vehicle routing, historical traffic data of the city road network was used from the Google Maps. Approach used in the present study can be extend to other urban areas in developing or underdeveloped nations for designing waste collection system