Landfill Site Selection: a Basis Toward Achieving Sustainable Waste Management

The improper collection and disposal of waste can cause serious problems in the near future. Unfortunately, in developing countries this issue has not been adequately addressed. The upward trend of waste production, on one hand, and lack of strategies to manage such materials, on the other hand, have been seen in many areas especially metropolitan cities with serious problems have led to a lot of environmental damage. Moreover, there are also some waste disposal drawbacks in cities. This study is a GIS approach aimed to perform a systematic landfill site selection study by introducing a decision support system for sustainable household waste management using a value-focused multi-criteria method. For this purpose, Sarab County was selected as a case study. The research shows how effective the multi-criteria method is in handling wide ranges of criteria involved in site selection studies.