Municipal Solid Waste Management using GIS Application in Mirpur Area of Dhaka City, Bangladesh

Identifying Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) disposal sites and appropriately managing them is a challenging task to many developing countries like Bangladesh. It is a complex issue in an urban area, as increasing population levels, rapid economic growth and rise in community living standard, accelerates the generation rate of MSW. The study area is zone-2 (Mirpur-Pallabi) of Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC) (10.40 km(2)) is a residential area, from where about 353.34 ton/day solid waste is generated and among them about 57.43% were managed by DNCC. There are 41 different size containers present at 17 locations in study area. The existing site and waste collecting containers are not sufficient, which deteriorates the environment due to illegal waste dumping and about 15 illegal dumping sites were identified. To identify proper waste dumping site and prevent contamination, Geographical Information System (GIS) was used to propose an efficient scenario with relocating the existing waste collecting containers and another scenario was proposed with number of containers (73) to attain an 93.68% waste collection efficiency including optimization and selection of waste collecting routes for the study area. This study also indicate that the application of GIS is an efficient and low cost tool to study and select appropriate dumping site so as to facilitate decision making processes.