Geospatial method of siting sustainable sanitary landfill in Johor Malaysia

Abstract

To obtain an accurate and precise result in any sanitary landfill siting study, one must be able to identify important criteria which are very crucial and challenging in geoinformatics. The level of importance of each criterion varies from one region or country to another. In this research, intensive literature review was carried out to extract the most important criteria to be used in siting sanitary landfill sites in the study area in accordance with local and international guidelines. Three main criteria were identified: environmental, social, and economic. They were divided into thirteen sub-criteria; water bodies, geology, soils, elevation, slope, residential areas, archeological sites, airports, population, roads, railways, infrastructures, and land use and land cover which were used to produce the map of the best potential sites. Ranking and weighing of each criterion was done using AHP pair-wise comparison matrix and normalization of the matrix to get the weight of each criteria. The study revealed that, 54% of the study area were unsuitable areas for sanitary landfill site, 12% less suitable, 21% suitable and 13% most suitable. Three most suitable potential sites were identified among the various sites from the class of most suitable sites in the final map and were validated using the satellite imagery of the study area via Google Earth PRO and field survey. This method can be an advanced alternative to the existing methodologies for selecting relevant criteria in siting sanitary landfill and for long-term planning of solid waste management.