Municipal solid waste landfill site selection for the city of Şanliurfa-Turkey: an example using MCDA integrated with GIS

Abstract

A municipal solid waste (MSW) management system needs solid waste management (SWM) techniques where the presence of a sanitary landfill is vital. One of the most important issues of sanitary landfilling is to locate the facility to an optimal location. Despite the versatility and case-dependent nature of conventional expert-based site selection procedures, the number of sites to be chosen increases with increased population forcing a number of constraints. Consequently, constraints and environmental regulations mechanically mask unsuitable areas, leaving very little areas to be assessed. This turns the situation into a challenging issue for a geographical information system (GIS) used with multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), to select optimal site. The study aims to apply MCDA integrated with GIS to select possible sites of a MSW landfill with the same expert and same cognitive parameters while compared with the already present one. Results of this study revealed that conventional expert-based methods could not always evaluate all constraints at the same time and map reproduction is limited when parameter maps are changing rapidly in time. In order to produce cognitive and reproducible analyses, GIS with MCDA integration offers a good solution for site selection issue and forms a good alternative for conventional methods.