Determining rural areas vulnerable to illegal dumping using GIS techniques. Case study: Neamț county, Romania
The paper aims to mapping the potential vulnerable areas to illegal dumpingof household waste from rural areas in the extra- Carpathian region ofNeamț County. These areas are ordinary in the proximity of built-up areasand buffers areas of 1km were delimited for every locality. Based onvarious map layers in vector formats ( land use, rivers, buil-up areas,roads etc) an assessment method is performed to highlight the potentialareas vulnerable to illegal dumping inside these buffer areas at localscale. The results are corelated to field observations and currentsituation of waste management systems. The maps outline local disparitiesdue to various geographical conditions of county. This approach is anecesary tool in EIA studies particularly for rural waste managementsystems at local and regional scale which are less studied in currentliterature than urban areas.