Managing emergency construction and demolition waste in Syria using GIS

The substantial quantities of construction and demolition waste (CDW) resulting from both emergency and non emergency events poses a great threat to the environment. Available landfill space is progressively declining, while demands for quarry products are increasing. Proper management and recycling of CDW helps alleviate these problems. This paper proposes a multi-criteria Geographic Information System (GIS)-based framework to manage CDW in emergency situations, specifically in war-stricken environments. The proposed framework covers estimating quantities of CDW, building a GIS model for automatic siting of suitable land for the construction of recycling facilities, and carrying out an economic assessment of CDW recycling. The framework is applied to the case of Syria, which has been suffering from the consequences of war for the past 7 years. The results show that the suitability rating for the location of recycling facilities nationwide varies from 18 to 64 percent depending on the values allocated to various environmental factors such as topography, geology, and infrastructure.