Geography of waste as a new approach in waste management study

Abstract

Municipal waste management in the last two decades has become a global environmental priority in the context of increasing amounts of waste generated due to the development of a mass consumer society. Various issues of waste management, territorial and temporal variability, spatial analysis of treatment or disposal facilities, systemic implications on the environment, the harmonization of international policy at national, regional and local level are solid arguments for studying this field by geography. Mostly technical or economic studies, lacking a vision of territory are supplemented in the conceptual and methodological level by geographers. This paper performed on the one hand, an overview of various approaches in current literature on waste management issue and on another hand analyses the geographical contributions in this field. Our conclusions lead to the idea that waste management must be performed according to the geographical features of the territory concerned.