Method for Assessing the Environmental and Social Risks of Unauthorized Landfill Sites

The problem of production and consumer waste generation is one of the main environmental issues of industrial society. However, the main method of waste disposal in Russia is still its landfilling at waste disposal facilities (landfill deposits, authorized and unauthorized dumps). A separate group of waste disposal facilities consists of illegal unauthorized landfill sites with solid municipal waste. The specificity of these waste disposal facilities is the complexity of monitoring of their formation and the difficulty of assessing their impact on the environment and public health. At present, there is no standard approved methodology for assessing the environmental and social risks of illegal unauthorized landfill sites. For that purpose, the authors have developed a method for assessing the hazards of unauthorized landfill sites, based on comparing the actual characteristics of landfills obtained during field surveys of urban areas with certain tabular values. Initial keeping track of landfill sites is fulfilled with the application of a web portal that implements geoinformational technologies. The use of the web portal for rapid detection of illegal unauthorized landfill sites, as well as the author’s method and soft-ware that implements this method allows for rapid assessment of the environmental and social hazard of landfills based on data from field surveys of urban areas without laboratory measurements. The results obtained are intended for the classification of illegal landfill sites in order to develop plans for their elimination, taking into account the priorities of environmental policy.