Environmental Impact Assessment of Proposed Location of Municipal Solid Waste DisposalCase Study: Hidaj City (Zanjan Province)

The high rapid urbanization, unappropriated patterns of consumption, changes in living standards and diversity of productions are the main factors of increasing of waste generation and changes in the composition of wastes that cause many problems in the environment. Accordingly, selecting a suitable site for landfill can prevent their adverse environmental impacts.

This investigation is an applied research using descriptive-analytical methods and was aimed to determine appropriate location for waste landfilling of Hidaj city in Zanjan province. For this purpose, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and ArcGIS 10.3 software were used. Accordingly, and given the required parameters for choosing the optimum site that have an important role in site selection, weighting using hierarchical method was performed and thereafter the layers were overlaid and the optimum sites were identified.

According to the results, the suitable area for landfill was diagnosed in the eastern part of the Hidaj city. The required area of land for landfill was determined based on the average rate of population growth, density of generated waste, volume of waste mass, and the average per capita of waste generation in the study area.
Discussion and

The results showed that the selected area likely has high potential for landfilling of municipal solid wastes of Hidaj for the next 20-year period.