Municipal solid waste landfill siting by using analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and a proposed karst vulnerability index in Ravansar County, west of Iran

In the past few decades, numerous attempts have been conducted on landfill siting procedures toward finding an environmentally accepted and a socioeconomically optimized approach. Despite the great attention landfill sitting has received, so far, due to each site's particular condition, introducing a universal framework for landfill siting processes has not yet been achieved. Regarding this fact, in this study, two different zoning procedures, LEPT and AHP, have been utilized in order to perform landfill siting for Ravansar County-west of Iran. LEPT is a proposed methodology applicable for assessment of karst vulnerability in regions with sparse data. In this study, LEPT has been applied to categorize the region into four karst vulnerability classes: very low, low, high, and very high. Devoting significant attention to areas with very high and high karst vulnerability potential, thirteen criteria, divided into three main categories, were used to categorize the study area into four suitability classes for landfill siting. These criteria were aspect and wind, distance from faults, distance from gas pipelines, groundwater depth, distance from mines, distance from rivers, distance from roads, distance from lakes, distance from residential areas, slope, distance from springs, distance from water wells, and soil thickness. Results showed that 5.2% of the study area is highly suitable for landfill placement.