Urban Waste Landfill Site Selection of Shiraz City by Analytical Hierarchy Process Model (AHP)

Landfill site selection is an important action in integrated solid waste management process. Different criteria should be considered in site selection. Therefore using special methods are necessary to evaluate the criteria. The object of the current study was to determine and select suitable sites for solid waste landfill in Shiraz city regarding the observation of environmental matters by using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) techniques done using software Expert Choice. In this study, at first for sanitary landfill site selection, 19 effective criteria including: Geological Situation, Soil, Slope, land use, distance from urban centers, rural and industrial towns, hydrographic network, Groundwater, the dominant wind direction, rain, road access, etc., were identified and prepared. In the next step on the basis of the sanitary landfill site selection regulations, each of the layers was graded such that Low graded layers showed non coordination or less coordination and high grade layers showed more coordination. The graded maps were merged with considering obtained weights in the Analytical Hierarchy Process and the final map was extracted. On the basis of this map, 2.6 percent of the region area had perfect appropriate conditions, 22.9 percent was appropriate, 33.5 percent was average, 27.9 percent was inappropriate and 13.1 percent was totally inappropriate for landfill. In general, four sites with an area over 272 hectares (which is estimated to be used for 15 years) were determined appropriate for landfill by using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and field visits for solid waste landfill in Shiraz and after comparison and evaluation of the criteria among the four sites, finally, the most appropriate site which was near Shiraz-Beyzae main road around Bereke village was determined and suggested in this Study.