Locating Exchange Stations of Dry Municipal Solid Waste in Urban Areas Case Study: City of Mashhad
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Indian Journal Of Natural Sciences www.tnsroindia.org. © IJONS Vol.6 / Issue 31 / August 2015 International Bimonthly ISSN: 0976 – 0997 RESEARCH ARTICLE Locating Exchange Stations of Dry Municipal Solid Waste in Urban Areas Case study: City of Mashhad Rostam Saberifar1*, Hamied Sadeghihesar2, Mostafa Safarian2 and Reza Ghabol 1Associate Professor, Department of Geography, Payame Noor University (PNU), Tehran, Iran, 2Student of Geography, Department of Geography, Payame Noor University (PNU), Tehran, Iran. Received: 27 May 2015 Revised: 21 Jun 2015 Accepted: 27 Jul 2015 *Address for correspondence Rostam Saberifar, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, Payame Noor University (PNU), Tehran, Iran, E-mail: [email protected] This is an Open Access Journal / article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. All rights reserved. ABSTRACT Population increase and higher waste production and fewer landfills are of the biggest problems and calamities of major cities. Accordingly the need for recycling and reducing mechanisms in waste production and landfilling is beingtaken more into consideration day by day.Separation at source by citizens and creating motives for their higher contribution are of the most beneficial mechanisms in reusing dry solid waste. As an instance daily production of 15 tons of paper in the city of Mashhadrequires studies and creating appropriate approaches to encourage citizens and implementing waste sortingin this city more than ever. One of the measures taken by Mashhad Municipality in this field is establishing stations for solid waste exchange in order to enable receiving and proper use of municipal non-corrupt materials.Thus the present article tries to locate such stations by consideringmeasures of population, accessibilities, waste physical analysis of municipality districts,determining the proper distance with other stationswith GIS software. The findings of the present study suggests 1, 8,9 and 11 as the suitable place for establishing the new waste collection stations. Key words: waste, recycling, locating, exchange station, GIS 9641 Indian Journal Of Natural Sciences www.tnsroindia.org. © IJONS Vol.6 / Issue 31 / August 2015 International Bimonthly ISSN: 0976 – 0997 Rostam Saberifar et al. INTRODUCTION Rapid population growth and increase in production of consumable as a result of progress and development in the recent years have led to daily increase of municipal waste.Development of industries, expansion of urbanization have madethe collecting issue, landfilling or reusing the municipal waste, a serious problem (Rafie’e et al., 2011). The fact that Iranian municipal waste management system is in critical condition and far from the desired condition is notconcealed to anyone (pour Ahmad, 2008). Recycling dry and usable materials of waste is one of the most desiredmechanisms of waste management, which results in less environmental pollution and incomes gained from recycling in addition to saving costs of reproduction and landfilling of such consumables. In fact Management and recycling solid waste is of crucial importance because of reducing the current waste amount and weight, easier method of collection and landfilling and the possibility of reusing materials in a more profitable way (Karimzadegan et al., 2005). Separation at source by citizens is one the most beneficial methods among recycling mechanisms in reusing dry waste. The separation at source plan began in 1999 in Mashhad and its developing process during the past 12 years has started from collecting dry waste from citizens’ house in 1999 and currently includes activities such as collecting offices’ paper waste by installing special containers, establishing stations for paper waste exchange with book purchase tickets and stationary, waste exchange stations with goods at schools, permanent dry waste exchange throughout the city and organizing and controlling traditional recyclers (Kazemi, 2011).According to statistics in Mashhad in 2010 around 650 thousand tons of waste were produced of which about 76% include home waste that around 2.5% of which are separated at source. It refers to low level of recycling activities in Mashhad and highlights the need for better municipal waste management more than ever. Dry waste exchange stations is one of the separation at source mechanisms that was carried out 2008 by Municipal waste Management Organization in Mashhad. Implementing this mechanism enables recycling and proper use of non-corrupt materials in municipal waste and prevents unsanitaryrecycling of such materials by traditional recyclers in addition to encouraging citizens in separating production waste. Since development of this plan and its success requires accurate locating of waste bank stations based on cultural, social and economic qualities of each district, the current study attemptsin locating dry waste exchange stations in the city of Mashhad byGIS. The studies show that locating waste bank stations received minute attention despite their importance in municipal waste separation and recycling and majority of the researches carried out have attempted in locating proper landfills. In this field it can be referred to studies done by MoeinO’dini et al. (2012), Motakan et al. (2009), Poorahmad et al. (2008), KhorshidDoust&Adeli (2010),SeyhaniPorshokooh et al. (2012), Niknami&HafeziMoqadas (2011) and Ali akbari& Jamal Livani (2012) on locating landfills in cities of Karaj, Tabriz, Babolsar, Bonab, Holpaygan and Behshahr. Additionally it can be referred to Rafiee et al. (2011) on the contribution of Mashhadi families in separation at source plans. Due to the importance of waste bank stations in collecting municipal recyclable materials it is expected that this study functions as an introduction toward better planning and more accurate locating of permanent collecting stations, developing separation at source plan and spreading the culture of municipal waste separation. Regional setting The study area is the city of Mashhad. Mashhad is the second metropolitan city and also the largest religious city of Iran where due to the presence of the shrines of 8'th Imam of Shia has history of 1200-year.The city covers an area of over 300 km2and has a population of over 2.77 million persons in 1390 (Rahnama et al., 2013). Because of presence of 9642 Indian Journal Of Natural Sciences www.tnsroindia.org. © IJONS Vol.6 / Issue 31 / August 2015 International Bimonthly ISSN: 0976 – 0997 Rostam Saberifar et al. the shrine of Imam Reza (AS), Mashhad is the spiritual capital of Iran and the international excellent pilgrimage, which more than 20 million internal and foreign pilgrims and tourists will travel there every year (Saghayee et al, 2013).The tourism economy in Mashhad due to the continuing of pilgrims and tourists, has a special stability in terms of economic factors. Important factors such as the number of pilgrims and tourists, the number of residential accommodation, catering and travel units, catering and travel, the average stay of tourists and the presence of different tourism attractions in the city, has highlighted the role of the tourism economy in Mashhad. So that due to the dominance of the tourism economy in Mashhad, the typology of the economy indicates the correlation between the different sectors of the urban economy in the field of services to pilgrims and tourists, and economic functions of Mashhad developed in providing needed services to tourists and pilgrims (Rahnama et al, 2013). And it can be concluded that with population increase, the amount of waste delivered to stations increases MATERIALS AND METHODS Firstly permanent dry waste exchange stations in 2012were determined separately in each district on a map of the city of Mashhad. Each station’s levels of income and people’s reference were considered as the measures of success in achieving people’s contribution.Several information levels based on measures such as education level, population, districts level of development, the proportion of dry waste to total waste (as a measure of people’s welfare in a district), accessibility network, activities of the traditional group, the distance between existing stations from each other and also people’s willingness toward contribution in this plan were created and the effectiveness of such indexes on waste stations’ income and contribution in order to locate new stations were considered.The distances between the stations were considered by Thiessen’spolygons and the effective radius of each station and locating in disadvantaged spaces and with lower density was determined by using GIS. In this regard after establishing the data bank and carried out studies, the indexes that have a direct association with rising contribution level were determined and their effectiveness were weighed by experts and by GIS analytical functions, the suitable spots for new stations were determined. The data used in the present study were collectedthrough library-based research and interviewing with experts in waste management plan of Mashhad city in 2012.In this regard the data concerning education indexes and population was taken from population records of Mashhad, districts’ development level from the study done by Shahnooshi et al. (2007), physical analysis of dry waste from Recycling Organization and also traditional efforts and people’s willingness toward contribution in