Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and Optimal Site Selection of Municipal Solid Waste Landfill via SAW, GIS and Leopold Matrix (Case Study: Yazd)

Waste production from any source would lead to the formation of various pollutants. The existence of these materials and in turn, every non-normative plan designed for waste disposal produces environmentally detrimental effects. Therefore, evaluating positive and negative effects of influential engineering- sanitary projects in environment seem to be necessary such as landfill construction for management of urban health. The present study aimed to evaluate positioning and of municipal solid waste landfills by geological information system (GIS). To this purpose, the required layers were prepared and profit sites were obtained by 3 steps: talent mapping, field survey to study characteristics of suitable areas and EIA by means of Leopold matrix for zonal ranking and selection of optimal location.
To depict talent map, the layers were combined by simple additive weighting method using various data including geology, land use, distance from the city boundaries, slope, distance from roads, vegetation, infiltration and hydrology. The resulted data suggested that four sites were posited in appropriate ranks.
The study findings revealed, that site No.1 (X:256915 & Y:3540127) was determined as the optimum location for engineering - Sanitary landfill.