Prioritizing Suitable Locations to Domestic Waste Disposal Considering Geomorphic Criteria

Increasing growth of population of the cities and metropolitan cities, while creating suitable opportunities for physical, economical and social development and increase of welfare level, has caused different incompetency in metropolitans. Increase of home waste materials is of the environmental challenges in most of metropolitans and selecting the appropriate areas of municipal solid waste landfill in mega cities is one of the environmental challenges of urban management, especially in metropolitan cities. Mashhad, with over three million populations is the second mega city in Iran, the second religious city in the world and spiritual capital of Iran. This metropolitan city is faced with a huge and great amount of producing home waste material. Identification of prone regions to the solid waste landfill is among the important issues of waste management in this metropolis. The purpose of this research was selecting and prioritizing areas for solid wastes disposal considering the Geomorphologic factors in Mashad. So using ranking MCDM methods including TOPSIS and AHP, five landfill sites for the city of Mashhad, was investigated and selected. Ranking has been done based on seven geomorphologic criteria involving slope, lithology, fault distance, surface water distance, ground water depth, and land use and geomorphology type. Using TOPSIS algorithm, weighting and ranking the regions was completed. To compare indices and criteria, AHP algorithm has been applied and pair wise of criteria was done. The results of the studies showed that the region 2 (the new landfill, located in Miami Road) has first rank to waste disposal. The results also indicated that the region 1 (located in Nishabour road) which is the old landfill of Mashhad is not a suitable place for waste disposal.