This study assesses the quantity and composition of household solid waste (HSW) in the City of Da Nang and proposes a transparent and standardised method for its assessment through a combination of very-high-resolution (VHR) satellite imagery, field surveys, questionnaires, and solid waste measurements on the ground. This was carried out in order to identify underutilised resources and to obtain discrete planning values at city level. The procedure proved to be a suitable method for reliable data gathering. To describe HSW generation, 818 valid datasets, subdivided into five building types, and their location were used. The average HSW generation rate was 297 g per capita per day. Within a total of 19 subcategories, organic waste had a share of 62.9%. The specific generation and composition of HSW correlates positively with both the building type and the spatial location within the city. The most HSW (509 g per capita per day), by far, was generated in the ‘villa-type’ building while in the ‘basic-type’ building, this was the least (167 g per capita per day). Taking into account the number of individual buildings, the total HSW generation in Da Nang in 2015 was estimated between 109,844 and 164,455 tonnes per year, which corresponds to about one-third to one-half of the total municipal solid waste.

This descriptor introduces a novel dataset, which contains the number and types of buildings in the city of Da Nang in Central Vietnam. The buildings were classified into nine distinct types and initially extracted from a satellite image of the year 2015. Secondly, changes were identified based on a visual interpretation of an image of the year 2017, so that new buildings, demolished buildings and building upgrades can be quantitatively analyzed. The data was aggregated by administrative wards and a hexagonal grid with a diameter of 250 m to protect personal rights and to avoid the misuse of a single building’s information. The dataset shows an increase of 19,391 buildings between October 2015 and August 2017, with a variety of interesting spatial patterns. The center of the city is mostly dominated by building changes and upgrades, while most of the new buildings were constructed within a distance of five to six kilometers from the city center.