Domestic Waste in Aule Gra, Akure Nigeria: The Role of Geoinformatics in Generation and Its Management

An environmental and global issue concerning a very significant problem in today’s world is the challenges of waste generation, collection, and its management. It is obvious that waste generation, collection, and management issues are not considered as a priority in the planning of our town estate and settlements which have eventually led to the refuse hill, a threat to human habitats, and economic descend. In the case of Aule GRA part of Akure metropolis, there has to be an appropriate determination of solid waste generated at the household level, effective collection and its evacuation at regular interval. In this paper, geoinformatics was considered as a decision support tool for the location of the household, a collection of waste generation, and its management. Google earth imagery of the study area was downloaded, GPS control point of six prominent places was taking, the imagery was georeferenced and digitized to produce a digitized map of the study area, questionnaires were distributed to the household in the study area, 64% out of questionnaires given were returned and used. The waste of each household was weighed over a period of one month to determine the rate of generation. From the result of the questionnaire, the number in each house were known and the waste per head per day was determined. The population of each household was used together with the waste per head to determine the total waste generated at each family household. A spatial database was developed which are used to predict the evacuation day for each household.