Municipal solid waste management in Russia: practices and challenges

It is annually produced 400 thousand tons of solid waste in the city of Rostov-on-Don, which is taken for disposal to landfill at the Northwest industrial area of the city. Nearly 60 tons of waste enters Rostov Material Recovery Facility every year for the sorting, extracting commercially attractive factions, pressing, briquetting and subsequent transportation of "residue tail" to the landfill. However, the percentage of recycling in Rostov (10%) remains low, as a result of the shortcomings of the system. Recently, the Administration of Rostov-on-Don has produced a development strategy of integrated municipal solid waste management to create a new system of waste management in Rostov-on-Don. The strategy focuses mainly at Resource efficiency, which is a blend of good infrastructure, collection and design. with a dash of innovation and a strong policy framework to back it up. For the successful implementation of the strategy it is necessary to introduce an integrated system of municipal solid waste management using GIS. The methodology of integrated system with using GIS was developed by specialists of City Planning and Community Development Department of the Rostov State University of Civil Engineering. It includes implementation of collection and storage of waste and environmental data along with vehicle's navigation system through ArcGIS ESRI software. It helps to facilitate collection operations, to analyze optimal locations for transfer stations, to plan routes for vehicles transporting waste from residential, commercial and industrial customers to transfer stations and from transfer stations to landfills, to calculate amount of waste collection sites in accordance with the population density and volume of bins, to locate new landfills and to monitor the landfill. GIS is a tool that also provides a digital data bank for optimization of waste collection sites allocation according with implementation of General City Plan. The territory of Rostov-on-Don has been chosen for case study. GIS allowed to make situational (operational) decisions for implementing the strategic approach to the municipal solid waste management plan of the city and supported innovative accompaniment of the process of development and implementation of priority national projects, targeted programs of ecological reconstruction and strategic plans of socio-economic development of municipalities.