Dynamics of municipal solid waste and landfill areas of Istanbul

Abstract

Waste management is a critical issue, and municipal solid waste constitutes a considerably important part of the waste that should be properly handled. With rapidly increasing population, urbanization and industrialization in Istanbul, available lands have become extremely limited. However, lands occupied by waste in Istanbul have been increasing due to growing population and increasing waste generation per person. Thus, the undesirable pattern which constitutes the dynamic problem in this study is the unrestrained expansion of areas allocated for waste accumulation (i.e. land lls) year by year. Therefore, this research aims to nd out how fast the existing land lls in Istanbul become full (i.e. how much the land lls in Istanbul expand over the next 40 years) and how these land lls can be more e ciently utilized with additional investments on waste treatment facilities and source separation improvements. Seven di erent scenarios which all contain di erent budget and source separation combinations are examined to determine an e ective strategy for waste management. Analyses indicate that source separation rate is as critical as the budget for capacity investments in waste management strategies. Moreover, it is shown that budget required to make capacity investments decreases with the increasing source separation. Therefore, source separation should be integrated to waste management strategies along with the capacity investments, since it is a more cost e ective way of reducing waste sent to land lls.