Landfill Site Selection in Haftkel County (Khuzestan Province) using GIS techniques based on Fuzzy-AHP

Waste management is one of the major challenges of urban management in different parts of the world. This problem is more severe in developing countries, which contain a large part of the world's population. The current research is to locate the landfill site selection in Haftkal county, Khuzestan. In this study, three main morphological, environmental and socio-economic criteria were considered. Sub-criteria include slope, elevation, geology, distance from faults, distance from water wells, distance from water surface, distance from roads, distance from oil and gas pipelines, distance from high voltage power transmission lines, distance from residential areas, distance from protected areas and landuse. According to the conditions of the city and with the help of experts' opinion, the main morphological criterion with 0.443 was assigned the most points and importance among the main criteria .Also among the sub-criteria slope, geology, distance from underground water wells and distance from roads got the most points. In this study, Geographic Information System techniques such as Weighted Sum, Fuzzy Overlay and Boolean was used and among the used Fuzzy Sum and Weighted Sum methods introduced the most suitable lands for the construction of a landfill site and the methods of Fuzzy Gamma 0.3 and Fuzzy Product were the most strict functions and they identified 171.14 square kilometers and 124.01 square kilometers of land in Haftkal as suitable for the construction of a landfill site. According to Boolean's logic the current landfill site of Haftkal is located in an inappropriate place and in the other of the studied methods it is in the average range.