Detection of waste dumping locations in landfill using multi-temporal landsat thermal images

The practice of solid waste disposal in conventional landfills has always been associated with adverse environmental impacts, leading to the migration of landfill gas and bad odour to the proximate areas. Apart from the obnoxious fumes and hazardous leachate, the potential of heat generation within these vast disposal sites has been observed during the aerobic and anaerobic decomposition process. Therefore, this study aims to demonstrate how to utilize thermal remote sensing technique to monitor the heat flux, which can aid in detecting the waste dumping location with a case study in the Jeleeb Al-Shuyoukh landfill in Kuwait, where the record of its physical boundary was found missing. Landsat TM/ETM+ images for ten-year (1985 to 1994) were acquired and subsequently processed with atmospheric correction so as to compute the land surface temperature (LST). Through overlay analysis, the multi-temporal LST contours were combined in order to detect the most probable dumping locations within the landfill. With reference to the 50 borehole locations drilled by the Environmental Public Authority of Kuwait, our results derived during the summer season yielded a better accuracy (72%) comparing to that derived during the winter season (70%). This can be explained by the waste decomposition process reaches to the peak in summer and more heat flux can be captured from the ground cover. In addition, the dumping locations buried with construction waste were found to have higher LST as compared to the sites containing organic waste in most of the cases, except for certain locations which contained the mixture of construction and organic waste in winter season.