Selection of Suitable Site for Solid Waste Landfill : a case study in Kirkuk City, Iraq

Abstract

Selection of a landfill site for solid wastes is considered one of the challenges for local governments and municipalities’ directorates in particular all over the world, simply because every single city produces huge amount of solid wastes (garbage’s) each day that come from homes, hospitals, schools, industry, offices and centers of markets. In this study, Kirkuk city has been selected as a case study to figure out the solutions for trash, bad odors in most of the neighbourhoods, groundwater pollution, harmful toxic wastes, etc. So, proper criteria selection is very important as a starting point of landfills to preclude unwanted long-standing effects. Otherwise the traditional process of site selection process is difficult because its time consuming and costly. An integration of Geographical Information System (GIS) and Expert Choices Process (ECP) method is best combined technique to solve complex decision making and to select based on the study area condition. Six criteria have been used to select potential suitable site landfill in Kirkuk city. It turned out that the highest criteria is the built up area and the lowest one is bearing capacity of soil (BCS). Moreover, the final produced map shows the suitable area for landfill siting The work purports to present methodology of this inquiry and objective can make impressive solve in global environmental change and its regularly supplies an efficacious operation to select the suitable site to landfill the solid wastes.