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At national level, EU legislation (through Council Directive 75/442/EEC on waste) requires each Member State to draw up one or more waste management plans in compliance with relevant EU directives, which are implemented by regional or local authorities. Each in-dividual Member State has the duty to apply the principles of these directives when implementing a national waste management system.EU Member States are also required by law to identify all waste disposal sites, undertake a risk assessment and then prioritise them for remediation if necessary.

“the management of non-hazardous residen-tial and institutional waste in urban areas, including collection usually is the responsibility of local gov-ernment authorities.”

waste management in Italy The “Ronchi” decree (Waste Management Act 22/77), published in February 1997 and the subsequent revisions of this Act, regulated the man-agement of waste in Italy at the national level, forbidding uncontrolled landfills and stipulating that every region must have a waste management plan. Despite the EU directive of 1999, which limited the use of landfills, this practice remains the main method of waste disposal in Italy. Moreover, a high level of illegal landfill sites resulted in numerous con-victions by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in 2007. The landfill problem is par-ticularly evident in southern Italy, which has the largest number of illegal landfills.In Puglia, a region in the south of Italy, the waste management plan intends to fight the abandonment, discharge and uncontrolled disposal of waste. The

current practices for waste monitoring in the region include:

• Inspection and monitoring activities that are carried out by provincial de-partments with local responsibilities;

• A regional waste register that is in its implementation phase;

• Implementation of a database for il-legal landfill;

• In this European and national scenario, Planetek Italia s.r.l., ERA-Maptec Ltd. and EBA Engineering Consultants are involved in the Wastemon project, funded by the European Space Agency.

The Wastemon projectThe project offers waste mapping and monitoring services aimed at improv-ing the environment, protecting human health and increasing efficiency in waste management across Europe and Canada. The services are based upon the use of remote sensing satellites cou-pled with the expertise of scientists.

Wastemon service offering Wastemon is based mainly upon very high-resolution applications, hyperspec-tral and thermal satellite imagery, and to a lesser extent on differential interfero-metric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR). These technologies are applied to filter

Success Stories

waste Monitoring and Management in EuropeAccording to the European Union Waste Framework Directive (European Directive 2006/12/EC), waste is defined as “any substance or object the holder discards, intends to discard or is re-quired to discard”. Waste may be broadly classified in three ways:1. hazardous waste that usually meets

one or more of these four characteris-tics: ignitability, corrosivity, reactivity, or toxicity;

2. Non-hazardous waste;3. Inert waste.Previous differences in the terminol-ogy used for waste classification led to calls for a standardised classification for

waste. In this sense, the EU has gener-ated a single catalogue that meets the needs of classifying and defining all waste. The final version of The European Waste Catalogue came into force on January 1st, 2002 with the European Commission Decision 2001/118/EC (as amended by 2001/119/EC).Waste can be disposed of in a number of ways, including landfill, incineration, re-cycling, mechanical biological treatment (anaerobic digestion and/or composting), pyrolysis and plasma arc gasification.The management of non-hazardous residential and institutional waste in urban areas, including collection, dis-posal and planning aspects, usually falls on the shoulder of local government authorities.

A wASTE MAPPING ANd MONITOrING SErvIcE TO IMPrOvE wASTE MANAGEMENT PrAc-

TIcES ANd TO dETEcT IllEGAl lANdFIllS uSING SATEllITE EArTh ObSErvATION (EO)

dATA IS uSEd by ThE ENvIrONMENTAl PrOTEcTION AGENcy OF ThE PuGlIA rEGION IN

ITAly ANd by cONvErSANO, A SMAll TOwN lOcATEd IN ThE SAME rEGION.

wOrldwIdE, INcrEASING wASTE lEvElS ArE bEcOMING ExTrEMEly cOMPlEx TO

dEAl wITh ANd wASTE MANAGEMENT IS ONE OF ThE MOST crITIcAl ENvIrONMENTAl

cONcErNS ThAT MOdErN SOcIETy IS FAcING. rEcENT INTErNATIONAl ANd NATIONAl

rEGulATIONS ArE INdEEd TryING TO ESTAblISh SuSTAINAblE SySTEMS ThAT PrEvENT

Or rEducE ThE AdvErSE EFFEcTS OF wASTE PrOcESSING Or dISPOSAl ON ThE

ENvIrONMENT.

ThESE All-EMbrAcING chArAcTErISTIcS MAkE SPAcE-bASEd EArTh ObSErvATION A kEy

TOOl FOr ThE MONITOrING ANd MANAGEMENT OF A wIdE vArIETy OF ISSuES rElATEd

TO wASTE MANAGEMENT.

ThE WASTEMON PrOJEcT PrOvIdEd kEy SuPPOrT FOr SOME wASTE MANAGEMENT

PrAcTIcES uSING SPAcE-bOrNE rEMOTE SENSING IMAGES. clOSE cOOPErATION wITh

ThE FINAl uSErS AllOwEd ThE PArTNErS OF ThE WASTEMON PrOJEcT TO clEArly

GAThEr ThEIr NEEdS ANd TO bETTEr SuPPOrT ThEM IN ThE PrOvISION OF AD HOC

PrOducTS, whIch cAN bE INTEGrATEd INTO ThEIr wOrkING SySTEMS.

A monitoring services to improve waste management at local level

by Daniela Drimaco

European Local and Regional authorities are of-ten responsible for waste management. Beyond the visual pollution it represents, illegal waste disposal also affects local eco-systems (Credits: Carla antonini).

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areas with potential buried and surface waste as well as monitoring active land-fill sites.Following analysis of user requirements and business opportunities for EO data in waste management, the following four services are offered:• Service 1A – Detection of sites with

potential buried waste• Service 1B – Support for in situ investi-

gations and monitoring of sites known to have buried waste

• Service 2 – Detection of sites with po-tential surface waste

• Service 3 – Mapping active landfills

Planetek Italia has implemented some of the aforesaid services by developing

products for a municipality located 30 km south-east of Bari in Puglia Region (South Italy). The extent of the test area is about 130 km2. Urban areas account for about 10%, while most of the rest of the terri-tory is covered by orchards, olive groves and arable land. As in most of southern Italy, this area is frequently affected by the phenomena of illegal waste disposal frequently located in the countryside.The steps of the service chain imple-mented by the Wastemon project and tested in Puglia are described below.

• Step 1 Ordering productARPA Puglia and the local Urban Planning Office of the Apulian

municipality placed the request to detect potential illegal waste sites in the mentioned area, located in the southern part of Puglia region.Planetek, responsible for Italy, ensured that the request could be fulfilled af-ter verification of the necessary data (availability of Very high Resolution data and ancillary data over the test site).

• Step 2 Feasibility analysisAfter the verification of the availability of the necessary input data, a feasi-bility analysis of the requirements expressed by ARPA Puglia was carried out.

• Step 3 Input data collectionThe WorldView-2 VhR images taken in April 2011, which included multi-spectral and panchromatic bands, were selected. The user provided the updated land-use map issued in July 2011, as ancillary1 data useful during the next step, and an orthophoto2 taken in 2006.

• Step 4 EO data processing and Step 5 data integrationSteps 4, 5 and 6 represent the core component of the service chain. As a first step, the WorldView-2 image was geometrically corrected in the refer-ence system requested by ARPA Puglia (UTM33 WGS84). Then, the corrected image was submitted for segmenta-tion process in an eCogniton3 software environment in order to produce a set

1 Data from sources other than remote sensing, used to assist in analysis and classification or to populate metadata.2 Aerial photograph  geometrically corrected (“or-thorectified”) such that the scale is uniform: the photo has the same lack of distortion as a map.3 eCognition is an original object-based image analysis software for geo-spatial solutions for any environment, data type, or specialised application.

of spectrally homogeneous objects. Following this, an object-based clas-sification was performed on the basis of the spectral response of the sam-ple area waste sites. The result was a preliminary land-cover map that identified potential illegal waste sites. The land-cover information and the road-network was used to filter out such preliminary results, building a sort of probability map based on se-lective criteria such as distance from the road network of less than 100m; distance from existing landfills, etc. The co-occurrence of the parameters related to the previous criteria makes the probability of finding illegal sites very high and allows the confirmation of the waste sites mapped from the preliminary EO data processing (done in step 4).

• Step 6 Product validationThis step was implemented and tested to ensure an appropriate spa-tial and thematic accuracy of the EO output data. A first validation check was performed by on-screen quali-tative analysis on the basis of the

Success Stories

The case of ArPA Puglia ARPA Puglia, the local technical body of Puglia Region in charge of the moni-toring of landfill and contaminated sites, is the Italian user that benefits from Wastemon’s results as a support tool to be compliant with European, Italian and regional directives. ARPA Puglia expressed its interest and willingness to use innovative Earth Observation (EO)-based technology for landfill monitoring, by expecting to in-tegrate the Wastemon products in their current waste monitoring systems. In particular, the user aimed to apply the project’s results to adopt a monitoring and prevention strategy for illegal landfilling at the level of the municipality. The interest of the user was focused on the monitoring of buried or near-surface il-legal landfills, surface landfills, tyre waste and illegal industrial waste disposal.The specific products required by ARPA Puglia are briefly described in the table below.

Services Product requirements

Buried or near-surface waste Location and extent of dumps of waste with clay or sandstone topsoil

Surface waste Location, extent and description of surface waste (mostly industrial dumps)

Surface waste Location and extent of potential illegal dumps of tyres

Table 1 Specific products required by aRPa Puglia

Subset of test site showing the output of auto-matic processing in red and the final delineation of an illegal waste site in yellow. The World-View2 image also allows identifying the tracks of the illegal transport of material to the site (Credits: Planetek Italia s.r.l.).

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Very-high-Resolution image available over the area of interest (WorldView-2 image and ortophoto). Then a field-survey was performed in order to assess the plausibility of the output result. Figure 2, which shows images taken during the field survey, confirms the occurrence of illegal waste sites. Over 10 potential illegal waste sites were mapped in the area of interest, and a sample of 5 sites were selected to be visited physically. The field sur-vey confirmed the occurrence of illegal waste sites in 4 of these therefore re-sulting in an accuracy of 80%.

“the urban planning office of the Municipality consid-ered that the product is an effective way to optimise the traditional monitoring activity”

• Step 7 Product formatting and deliveryThe map of the potential waste sites was delivered following a template of ArcGIS digital layout (Figure 3). The results are projected in the reference system requested by the final user. The waste site map is delivered with a technical report describing the char-acterisation of the area under analysis

with reference to the particular critical events affecting the site.

user feedback and Wastemon services benefits The Italian end-user organisations in-volved in the Wastemon project are in charge of environmental monitoring both at regional scale (ARPA Puglia) and at local scale (Apulian Municipality, Urban Planning Office).

At the end of the testing activity, the resulting products have been deliv-ered directly to the local user, the Urban Planning Office of the Apulian Municipality in order to collect the first impression on the quality of the output. The user showed great interest in the results, deemed it useful source of support for their current cartography updating and to complete the under-standing of their local land evolution. The satellite-derived product has been evaluated as an effective way to opti-mise the traditional monitoring activity and a complementary instrument to face the even more frequent phenomena of illegal exploitation of land resources. As a matter of fact, after the delivery of the waste map, the Apulian Urban

Planning Office started with a field campaign aimed to check the reliability of the information provided to proceed with legal actions in case of confir-mation. The field checks have been performed by the police authority in charge of environmental monitoring. As a result, the information detected by remote sensing has been confirmed and some legal actions have been placed for the confiscation of those plots of land where a waste site was detected.The success case in Puglia, is testified not only by the legal measures taken by the local authorities but also by the great echo of the news published by the local newspapers, highlighting the importance of the information extracted from satel-lite data analysis for the local authority and the real possibility to be fully inte-grated into their land monitoring activity.

The final results have been evaluated as a very useful tool to take operative and strict decisions in a faster, more accu-rate and economic way. Moreover, the perfect integration of the final products into the user’s working systems, allowed the customer to further appreciate the results and to better understand the po-tential of Earth Observation data.

Success Stories

Example of surface waste map produced for an apulian site (Credits: Planetek Italia s.r.l.).

daniela drIMAcO received the degree in Telecommunication Engineering in 2005 from the Federico II University of Naples, Italy.From July 2006 to February 2007 she started an on-the-job training period in Planetek Italia s.r.l., Bari, Italy through which she did an internship at ESRIN centre, European Space Agency, Frascati, Italy focused on Earth Observation and WebGIS technologies exploita-tion for environmental monitoring and management applications.

From March 2007 up to now she works in Planetek Italia s.r.l. as Business Development Manager R&D supporting the technical and economical project proposal and following the main Earth Observation R&D activities carried out by European Commission, European Space Agency, Italian Space Agency, national and local institutes.

Illegal waste areas confirmed in situ after being detected using Eo data (Credits: Planetek Italia s.r.l.).