APPLICATION OF THE ELECTRE III METHOD FOR A SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Abstract

In recent years, effective disposing of solid waste environmentally and economically has become mandatory due to the increase in environmental problems resulted by the solid waste. Furthermore, choosing a solid waste management system appears to be an important decision making problem. Hence, economical, social, cultural and technical factors in choosing thesolid waste management systems should be considered together. A solid waste management system may have different alternatives to be evaluated by considering several criteria.Hence, this type of problem is considered as Multi Criteria Decision Making problem. Therefore, in this study, there were five alternative system scenarios (MRF, recycling, composting, incinerating and landfilling processes) ranked by using ELECTRE III for Eskisehir city/Turkey.Eskisehir is one of the developing cities of Turkey where approximately 750 tons/day waste is generated in total. It is required to apply an effective MSW management system since the generated MSW is dumped in an unregulated dumping site that has no liner, no biogas capture, etc. Final ranking for scenarios was in the following order: S3>S2>S1>S4=S5. According to the comparisons and the sensitivity analysis, scenario S3 (15% recycling+77% composting + 8% landfilling) for MSW management system in Eskisehir should be preferred.