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.