The Environmental Impact of Syria’s War on Waste Management in Latakia City

The Syrian waste management has been less and less efficient since the Syrian war, also, even waste management in Syria wasn’t in a good situation before the war but it became worst during the war time, although this waste management was fully supported by the state. It made to put more concentration on collection system in Syria than waste treatment or disposal. Also, in view of increasing amounts of waste because of the Syrian war and internal migration from other cities to Latakia city. This led to more difficulties in the waste management especially the waste collection as most of the streets were full of waste. This put a lot of pressure on the Latakia municipality, in addition to significant decrease in landfill capacities for the city. However, some changes had to be updated during the emergency case in collection system management and waste treatment and disposal. This was urgently needed to protect the environment and the people from the waste dangerous impact. For Latakia city the waste produced daily rate is about 840 tons. The aim of this project was to draft a solution of the solid waste collecting system in Latakia city by demonstration of the new existing situation of waste management in Latakia city during the increasing of population because of the internal migration and using the geographic information systems (GIS) to ensure a sufficient waste containers distribution and re-manage its distribution because of increasing the number of waste containers. This is needed to cover all areas in the city to protect the environment and the public health and to improving the waste collection system. As a conclusion of this project result, the amount and characteristics of solid waste were estimated, in addition to the new characteristics of solid waste created by the increasing of population. All tools and methods used for this study (in terms of distribution of the current waste collection containers to cover the new areas, also the GIS analysis, and increasing the number of solid waste containers) were demonstrated for better planning. However, this minimized the pollution to protect the human health. Therefore, to manage this amount of solid waste was an urgent need to choose the new techniques which can help a lot in waste management in emergency cases.