Evaluating the existing landfill site using gis and rs: the case of hosanna town, snnpr, Ethiopia.

Abstract

Solid waste management is a problem encountered by every country in the world but the situation is particularly severe in developing countries where poor waste disposal can be unsafe for environment and public health. The process of finding ideal solid waste landfilling site is very difficult and hard task as it involves manipulating and considering a number of spatial data from different sources. The negative effect of landfill on the environment and society is mainly caused due to improper location of landfill site. Due to this, proper landfill siting for solid waste management has become the most serious environmental and socioeconomic issue challenging most of the towns and cities especially in developing countries like Ethiopia. Selection of landfill site at appropriate location requires consideration of several biophysical and socioeconomic factors. The recent Potential improvement in GIS and RS integrated with AHP can help such decision problems to be solved systematically. The present study was interested to apply GIS and RS techniques integrated with AHP for proper landfill site selection in the case study. Landfill site selection is complex task. But, GIS can ease because of its potential to store large volume of data and manipulation ability. AHP is a method for analyzing decisions when multiple and contradicting objectives are considered. The factors used for this study includes (land use/cover, protected area, slope, road, drainage, borehole, soil, and geology). From these factors, more relative importance weight was given to LU/LC. Using these factors, after being reclassified their suitability thematic maps were prepared. Different weights for each criterion was assigned by AHP procedures then all the datasets were combined together in weighted overlay tools. For further analysis, highly suitable areas were used. The findings have shown only about 192 hectares of area was potentially very high suitable for landfill siting. From highly suitable locations, only four candidate sites with size capacity > 20 hectares were considered for further landfill siting analysis. Then, four candidate sites were identified and were prioritized using 3 most important criteria. The Analysis of evaluation on the study area have shown that among the four candidates, LF1 with areal coverage of 68.25 hectares was prioritized as the 1st rank top suitable landfilling site. Generally, the South East part of Hosanna town is the most suitable area for solid waste landfilling