Municipal Solid Waste Landfill Site Selection: Integrating Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Methods and Mathematical Modelling-A Case Study

Increasing solid waste amount arisen from the urbanization and population growth is an inevitable outcome in many countries. Solid waste has become one of the serious environmental problems and peculiar solid waste pathways are required to prevent contamination of environment. The optimal planning of the waste management should comprise the operations such as minimization, collection, landfilling and recycling of the waste. Also, location selection for landfill of municipal solid waste (MSW) is an effective step even essential, due to growing area shortage for waste disposal. In this respect, landfilling of MSW has been addressed in Tunceli, Turkey using an integrated approach. The Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (Fuzzy-AHP), a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method, is utilized to decide the weights of the environmental, technical, economic, and social criteria regarding uncertainty. Then, the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is conducted to rank the alternative landfill districts. Finally, the sub locations of selected district are mathematical modelled regarding transport cost, investment cost and demand with an integer linear programming model. The computational results indicate the proposed method effectiveness with a systematic approach by integrating MCDM and mathematical modelling.