1222 | 107 | Environmental problems on small islands: the case of waste management and the urban sprawl in the Canary Islands. | Lorenzo Carlos Quesada Ruiz1, Levi García-Romero2, Néstor Marrero-Rodríguez2

The illegal landfilling and their management causes damage to the environment and the local economies. In island territories, this problem is exacerbated by the lack of treatment centers or the accessibility to them, the cost of legal waste disposal and the spatial limitations of the territory imposed. In Canary Islands, solid waste landfilling is the second most common type of environmental crime, together with illegal building and construction. This work addressed the possible relationships between the occurrence of both crimes for the period between 2001 and 2020 from descriptive statistics and land use analysis based on the environmental crime data reported by the Environmental Protection Agency of the Government of the Canary Islands. Density maps were also generated for each of the offenses for the different study periods. Thus, a total of 34,000 cases of environmental crimes were analyzed. The overall results of the analysis of the occurrence of both crimes showed a rather high number of crimes recorded during the period of the “housing bubble”, with a rather sharp decrease from the beginning of the 2008 financial crisis. The number of landfilling decreased as well as the number of crimes related to illegal constructions and buildings. In this sense, being construction and demolition waste the majority waste typology, we could advance a high relationship between the processes of urban growth and the generation of illegal waste. Thus, it was observed through density maps that during the peaks of greater construction activity there was a greater concentration of these crimes in areas of incipient urban sprawl, especially in tourist areas. In addition, it was found that the largest number of crimes related to illegal construction and solid waste landfilling were mainly in rural areas, based on an analysis of the distance to certain land uses.

Lorenzo Carlos Quesada Ruiz1, Levi García-Romero2, Néstor Marrero-Rodríguez2
1Physical Geography and Regional Geographic Analysis, University of Seville, 41004 Seville, Spain 2 Grupo de Geografía Física y Medio Ambiente, Instituto de Oceanografía y Cambio Global, IOCAG, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC), Canary Islands, Spain
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