Site selection for Shahindezh city landfill using AHP and GIS

Site selection for landfill is an important issue for planning and management of solid waste materials on the metropolitan cities. In order to prevention of environmental, ecological and economical impacts of waste material, investigations for selection of suitable site should be done in a scientific trend. Nowadays multi-criteria decision analysis methods and GIS systems are widely using for environmental planning.
Shahindezh city with 35 tones daily waste material production is facing with environmental, social and healthy problems. In this research, in roder to selection of suitable site for landfill of Shahindezh city, some important criteria including hydrogeology, hydrogeology, litology, land use, vegetables developing, soil condition, topography, transmission lines, distance from city and main roads and faults are considered. After making pair-wise comparison matrix for the criteria, the weight of information layers determined by using of Expert Choice11 software in the GIS media based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Therefore the appropriate zones for landfill of Shahindezh city are divided into four categories according to the location potential from completely suitable to completely unsuitable. As a result 6 areas are selected and subjected to visiting and filed investigations. In term of site visit, three areas are determined as proper locations. The selected areas are compared to each other based on similarity to the ideal choice by using TOPSIS method. Finally area no. 2 located in the west of Shahindezh (in the north of the upper Sarojeh village) was introduced as the best area for landfill site of this city