GIS based sanitary landfill suitability analysis for sustainable solid waste disposal

Abstract

One of the major challenge in waste management is the issue of selecting an appropriate site for the disposal of municipal solid waste (MSW). This is because landfill siting analysis typically requires evaluating various rules, factors, constraints, and numerous spatial data such as environmental, economic, social etc. This paper introduced an integration of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in selecting optimal and sustainable site for sanitary landfill for proper solid waste management in Johor Bahru, Malaysia with the consideration of future population and waste generation prediction. The site selection criteria were retrieved based on existing literatures, Malaysian landfill siting guidelines and expert judgements. Several input criteria were used for this study which include water body, road, slope, elevation, rail lines, forest, vacant and agricultural lands, soil, geology, and urban areas. All these criteria maps were prepared in the GIS environment after which the criteria weight was obtained from AHP pairwise comparison matrix and normalization. Furthermore, the weighted criteria were evaluated through GIS software by using the weighted overlay tool in ArcGIS. The results of the study are categorized into 'most, 'suitable' and 'unsuitable' landfill sites. The best sites are those that possess the optimal quality and characteristics for sustainable MSW disposal while the suitable sites can be kept as back up for future use.