Progressive Monitoring of Micro-Dumps Using Remote Sensing: An Applicative Framework for Illegal Waste Management

Abstract

Illegal dumping is one of the major issues to be addressed by public managers in both developed and developing countries. The adequate tackling and enforcement of such unlawful activities require continuous territory monitoring, the lack of which is the principal cause of the failure of traditional systems based on patrolling, eventually triggered by sparse crowdsourced data. This work proposes the digitalization of the entire illegal waste management monitoring process through an innovative decision support system based on multiscale remote sensing data. These data enable the assessment of the risk level of specific areas, thus determining inspection priorities in line with the available patrolling resources. The proposed methodology provides a tool to assess the impact of diverse monitoring system parameters on overall the performance in light of the expected operating costs and to understand whether remote sensing can help a better management of illegal waste in a specific operational scenario, thus helping in the determination of the best cost–benefit trade-off. Simulation results over a demonstration scenario, based on realistic dumping/restoration dynamics and the typical performance of satellite detection systems, show that the adoption of remote sensing technologies in the monitoring process can increase the restoration capacity by about 10% compared to traditional patrolling.