Employing remote sensing data for detection of unregulated landfills around Stolipinovo district, Plovdiv province, Bulgaria

The present work investigates an unregulated landfill located in the immediate vicinity of the Stolipinovo district, Plovdiv. In June 2015, specialized teams began removing illegal landfills in the district. Despite clean-up efforts, the region continues to face challenges with waste accumulation, partly due to insufficient waste collection infrastructure. Monitoring landfills (regulated or unregulated), their thermal pollution and dynamics through remote sensing methods can and does have a number of advantages that make these methods extremely effective. This is because remote sensing contributes to greater safety and accessibility for researchers, the observation of multiple parameters, much more effective monitoring of landfills devoid of the subjective factor, easy detection of illegal landfills, effective assessment of natural disaster risk, control over recycling and waste tracking, reduction of financial costs for human monitoring and last but not least generation of a large database for climate analyses. This study presents various approaches to spatial data analysis that can be used to locate and map unregulated dumps located within the Stolipinovo district. Various methods for visualization and interpretation of satellite data have been used. Composite images from the multispectral instrument (MSI) of the Sentinel 2 platform of the Copernicus program of the European Space Agency were used. The land surface temperature of the landfill was calculated using the thermal bands from the Landsat as Landsat 8, Landsat 9 (OLI / TIRS) and Sentinel 3 SLSTR sensors. Data from different seasons and years were used in order to monitor the dynamics of thermal pollution in the study area. Assessment of the territory on which the unregulated dump located has been made.