Solid Waste Disposal Site Selection and Suitable Management Strategy of Bardhaman Municipality, West Bengal, India

Abstract

Bardhaman Municipality is one of the fastest developing Municipalities in West Bengal with a population of 3,14,265 and population density of 11,949/sq km in 2011. The population growth rate of this Municipality is 10.04 % from 2001 to 2011. This Municipality has around 71,618 houses which generate 153.48 Metric Ton of solid waste per day. The study has been carried out to select solid waste disposal site and to find out the suitable management strategies of solid waste system by using Analytic Hierarchy Process and Geographical Information System techniques. Five criteria have been taken for disposal site selection namely land use land cover, distance from road and railway, surface water body, Normalised Difference Vegetation Index and household density. Thematic layers are prepared using Remote Sensing and GIS technique. Weights were assigned to all the themes and their classes through AHP and finally overlay analysis technique was applied in Arc GIS Software to identify the disposal sites. The main problem is open dumping of solid waste without recycling, which resulted in environmental pollution for this Municipality. The study has been concluded with some fruitful management strategies which may be beneficial to the local people as well as municipal authority.