Abstract
As a result of tightened waste regulation across Europe, reports of waste crime have been on the rise. Significant stockpiles of tyres and plastic materials have been identified as a threat to both human and environmental health, leading to water and livestock contamination, providing substantial fuel for fires, and cultivating a variety of disease vectors. Traditional methods of identifying illegal stockpiles usually involve laborious field surveys, which are unsuitable for national scale management. Remotely-sensed investigations to tackle waste have been less explored due to the spectrally variable and complex nature of tyres and plastics, as well as their similarity to other land covers such as water and shadow. Therefore, the overall objective of this study was to develop an accurate classification method for both tyre and plastic waste to provide a viable platform for repeatable, cost-effective, and large-scale monitoring. An augmented land cover classification is presented that combines Copernicus Sentinel-2 optical imagery with thematic indices and Copernicus Sentinel-1 microwave data, and two random forests land cover classification algorithms were trained for the detection of tyres and plastics across Scotland. Testing of the method identified 211 confirmed tyre and plastic stockpiles, with overall classification accuracies calculated above 90%.
Highlights
Increased regulatory control of waste, which is partly due to a heightened public sense of sustainable development, has created the conditions whereby waste crime operates alongside a legitimate waste sector [1]
Such environmental crime exploits the physical characteristics of waste, taking advantage of vulnerabilities in regulation enforcement, the complexity of its downstream infrastructure, and market opportunities for profit; legitimate economies are short-changed through the unlawful and often dangerous disposal and storage of waste. While this is a widespread issue that covers all manner of waste material, tyres and plastics are of particular concern
Training data collected from across the study region indicated several potential spectral relationships that can be exploited to improve the classification of the tyre and plastic waste from satellite data
Summary
Increased regulatory control of waste, which is partly due to a heightened public sense of sustainable development, has created the conditions whereby waste crime operates alongside a legitimate waste sector [1]. In addition to the potential fire risks from stockpiled tyres, if intact waste tyres are stored improperly, they may provide a habitat for several disease vectors such as the West Nile virus, encephalitis, and dengue fever [9,10]. Such risks, alongside the longevity of tyres, highlights the importance of efficient waste management of the material
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