Optimization of municipal landfill siting in the Red Sea coastal desert using geographic information system, remote sensing and an analytical hierarchy process

This paper describes an analytical approach to the use of geographic information system (GIS), remote sensing, and an Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to identify and locate suitable locations for new landfill sites in a rapidly growing tourist destination along coastal desert regions of the Red Sea in Egypt. The study took into account factors including the proximity of municipal landfill sites to transportation routes, hotels, tourist resorts, airports, the coast, groundwater, high flood risk zones, faults and fractures, and residential communities. These factors or criteria were categorized into three regularity groups. Experts from governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations, and academic institutions scored the criteria grids and determined the relative importance ratio of each pair of criteria inside regularity groups and the relative importance of each pair of the regularity groups. Then, an AHP ArcGIS extension was applied using pairwise comparison matrices to determine the weight of individual criterion in each regularity group and the weight of the regularity groups. The weighted scored grid of municipal landfill siting criteria was used to locate regions that were highly conformal with all the criteria. Three suitable municipal sites were delineated out of these regions by a field survey.