Site Screening for Landfill Development at the District Level: Case Study in the Prestea Huni-Valley Municipality of Ghana

Edward Attimo Amihyiah Kwesi, Emmanuel Sablah, Joel Kwabena Lawerteh, Anthony Kwofie Mends

Abstract


The acquisition of sites for landfill development as suitable alternatives to solving the environmental and health problems associated with open dumping has been a difficult challenge for many urban areas in Ghana and other developing countries. This paper presents the steps and results of a simple but practical GIS-based methodology for meeting existing regulatory requirements, policy guidelines and local conditions in the selection of landfill sites. A case study approach was adopted with the Prestea Huni-Valley Municipal Area (PHMA) as the study area. Equipment used include a desktop computer, ArcGIS and Microsoft Office Software, Google earth, GPS receiver and field cameras. With the waste management needs of the study area and the regulatory requirement as bases, the necessary data sets were gathered and organized into a spatial database suitable for site selection analysis. The factors considered included proximity to water bodies, roads, railways and settlements; land cover/use types; slope; hydrogeology; and soil characteristics. The analytical processes used include supervised classification, constraint mapping, buffering, overlays, raster-vector conversion, boolean algebra and simple additive weighting for the multi-criteria decisions involved. The initial results gave over 100 sites that met the regulatory requirements but these were prone to about 50 suitable ones in a second stage screening, where sites that were not economical for landfill development in terms of their morphology, accessibility and lifespan capacity were dropped and classified as unsuitable. Accuracy assessment were done to ensure the reliability of data used and results obtained by using the method of ground-truth and input data comparison with model results. The paper recommends the method for waste management departments in PHMA and other similar areas and that the few suitable sites constituting about 0.67% of the entire area must be protected to serve the growing needs for improved waste disposal in the study area.


Keywords


Site Selection, Regulatory Requirements, Waste Disposal, Landfill, Prestea Huni-Valley

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