Did We Produce More Waste during the COVID-19 Lockdowns? A Remote Sensing Approach to Landfill Change Analysis

The COVID-19 pandemic caused significant disruptions to ordinary lives. These disruptions included restricting human movement through local 'lockdowns.' This article applies a multitemporal analysis of differential interferometric synthetic aperture radar to evaluate the relationship between restrictions on movement and solid waste production in landfill sites. We selected three landfill sites from Africa, Euro-Asia, and America to assess the impact of restricted mobility on waste production. Our research shows that solid waste production and restrictions on human mobility are significantly correlated. This article indicates that a reduction in human mobility increases human waste production even after accounting for changes in economic activities. The research highlights the benefit of using remote sensing SAR data for monitoring the impact of human activities on the environment. The use of remote sensing data is crucial for these applications, given that the outcomes might be counter-intuitive. The source code for the workflows, Jupyter notebooks and scripts are available at https://github.com/tvanzyl/sar_jhb_dumps to support reproducible research in remote sensing.