A New Landfill Siting Method Based on Land Classification Maps and GIS

Municipal solid waste (MSW) landfill site selection is an important task in waste management, because the optimal siting must consider numbers of evaluation criteria. The objective of this study was to propose a new quantitative method for reducing the number of evaluation criteria inputs for landfill siting, simplifying the siting process and reducing the time needed as well as enhancing the multi-applicability of available soil maps. Consequently, after presenting the proposed method, it was applied to select a suitable landfill site for Marvdasht city and was compared to the common environmental siting method afterwards. At the first step, the necessary criteria for landfill siting including four constraint and eight factor criteria was specifically obtained from land classification map of the study area. In the next step, the criteria were standardized by rating approach and were then weighted. Thereafter, by using simple additive weighting method, the suitability map for landfill siting was obtained in a 0-1 domain and divided into five suitability classes. Comparing the results of the proposed method with the common environmental siting approach indicated that the best suitable lands for landfill siting based on both methods are located almost in the same region. Despite the fact that the numbers of evaluation criteria in the proposed method were less than the traditional methods, the weighting method was much easier and constructing the database for landfill siting was more convincing. Further, the results obtained from land classification map can well consider the productivity of soils.