Prediction of the amount of urban waste solids by applying a gray theoretical model

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Li, Xiao-ming | Wang, Ming | Zeng, Guang-ming | Liu, Jin-jin

Affiliations: Department of Environmental Science and Technology, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China

Abstract: Urban waste solids are now becoming one of the most crucial environmental problems. There are several different kinds of technologies normally used for waste solids disposal, among which landfill is more favorable in China than others, especially for urban waste solids. Most of the design works up to now are based on a roughly estimation of the amount of urban waste solids without any theoretical support, which lead to a series problems. To meet the basic information requirements for the design work, the amount of the urban waste solids was predicted in this research by applying the gray theoretical model GM (1,1) through non-linear differential equation simulation. The model parameters were estimated with the least square method (LSM) by running a certain MATALAB program, and the hypothesis test results show that the residual between the prediction value and the actual value approximately comply with the normal distribution, and the probability of the residual within the range (-0.17, 0.19) is more than 95%, which indicate obviously that the model can be well used for the prediction of the amount of waste solids and those had been already testified by the latest two years data about the urban waste solids from Loudi City of China. With this model, the predicted amount of the waste solids produced in Loudi City in the next 30 years is 8049000 ton in total.

Keywords: gray theoretical model, prediction, waste solids

Journal: Journal of Environmental Sciences, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 43-46, 2003