Feasibility of Common Landfill Establishment in Khomeynishahr City and its Adjacent Cities Using Fuzzy Logic and AHP

Nowadays, landfill method is used as the last strategy in the integrated solid waste management hierarchy. It is more common and has lower costs than other sanitary disposal methods. Selecting the suitable landfill site can prevent the inappropriate ecological and socio-economical effects. Landfill site selection requires the analysis of spatial data, regulations and accepted criteria. The main objective of this study is to determine the suitable common municipal solid waste landfill site for Khomeynishahr and its 6 adjacent cities. For this purpose, the multi criteria evaluation method, GIS and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) were used to evaluate the suitability of appropriate landfill site by emphasizing on regional vision. Different information layers related to the maps of the study area were provided and superposed using both the Boolean and fuzzy methods (classification of suitable areas in the valued range of 0 to 255) in the GIS environment. The AHP was used for weighing the information layers. After the necessary analysis, the proposed suitable landfill sites with an area of less than 1% were defined in 5 regions and in central parts of the study area. The results obtained from this study can be used as the first priority to help the decision makers in suitable landfill site selection.