Municipal Solid Waste Landfill Sites Selection for Visakhapatnam City under Vision 2020 Using GIS and AHP

Abstract

Municipal solid waste management is considered as one of the most serious environmental and social issue challenging municipal authorities in all major cities in India. The main problem is selecting a suitable landfill site for Solid Waste Management (SWM). Land filling is now accepted as the most widely used method for addressing this problem in all countries of the world. However, appropriate site selection for land filling is a problem in waste management and therefore needs to be addressed. This study aims at selecting a suitable solid waste landfill site for Visakhapatnam City, India for its future needs. A set of four main criteria and 13 sub criteria are considered for identifying suitable sites. The combination of GIS and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) has been used to give weights to different criteria. Relative Importance Weightage (RIW) of each parameter over the other is calculated by pair-wise comparison using the 9-point scale. The suitability index (0.1-0.6) values are determined for five classes (excellent, good, moderate, poor and very poor) for land fill siting. The study also aims at generating an optimal route to the suitable sites identified from the waste transfer station by using Network Analyst module of ArcGIS software such that the total system cost can be minimized.