Landfill site selection for urban wastes using Analytic Hierarchy Process and Leopold matrix methods (Case Study: Malekan city)

Uncontrolled urban expansion in country cause to increasing of waste production in the cities and became to an important issue despite the progress of science and technology. The purpose of this study is to investigate and select a suitable location for landfill in Malekan city.

In this study, the required criteria including lithology, land use, vegetation, soil characteristics, topography (slope), distances from urban areas and away from the main road, the main and secondary canals, residential areas, wells and aqueducts, faults have been identified and collected. To form a pair wise comparison matrix and the weight of information layers determined by using of the Expert Choice 11 software and analytic hierarchy process. Then the appropriate zones have been modeled by overlaying of different layers in GIS media.

It was found that the current waste disposal site of Malekan city does not have sufficient conditions for waste disposal and in order to select a suitable location, in addition to addressing the impact of the included criteria, it is necessary to use field visits and environmental assessments to finally select the most suitable place for landfilling.

As a result, 8 zones have been selected that 4 of them were eliminated based on field visits. Finally in order to planning of the studied area waste, the candidate zones were evaluated by the Leopold matrix and finally the zone number 4 located on the east of Qalejogh village has been selected as a best location for landfill of Malekan urban waste.