Impact Assessment of Candidate Landfill Sites for Zanjan City Using Improved RIAM Method

In Zanjan city, no research has been conducted for selection of a suitable site for sanitary disposal of solid waste. At the moment, a traditional landfill site is used for solid wastes disposal in the vicinity of the city. The site has high potential to pollute the environment due to the open air practice of waste disposal. Hence, it is urgent to select a site for this purpose from amongst the proposed ones. Unsuitable landfill sites may have many negative impacts. Using environmental impact assessment can highly help mitigate the negative effects and arrive at a sound environmental management plan.RIAM is an approach that guarantees a sound and at the same time fast and clear evaluation of the main environmental impacts of development projects. This approach has many advantages and some disadvantages, and of the latter the subjectivity has been targeted in this research.We used the RIAM that was upgraded with the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to lower the subjectivity implicit in the scoring of the impacts and introduce more objectivity to the process.Method of study: We used suggested landfill sites in Zanjan City and assessed their environmental impacts through integration of AHP and RIAM methods. Comparing the effects of each of these landfills on the environment helped us in selecting the least impacting one. In the process, we integrated the RIAM with the AHP and found the present landfill site still holds some edge over other suggested sites. The possibility of improving the original RIAM method with the AHP was also shown to be applicable and promising.Discussion and This study shows that RIAM method can be upgraded through integration with the AHP method. The integration transformed challenging ideas on the scoring of the impacts and provided an opportunity for inclusion of expert opinion and greatly enhanced achievement of a unified impact score.