Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
partly due to the acceleration of the phenomenon of urbanization. From the logistic
point of view, waste management problems include location and routing aspects.
In particular, despite the efforts to reduce waste production at the source, disposal
of solid waste at appropriate facilities is still a crucial need. The identification
of suitable municipal waste disposal sites is a complex problem either from the
technical or from the socio-political point of view. From the technical point
of view the process requires environmental, health, economic and engineering
considerations to be taken into account. On the other hand, waste disposal sites
are a typical example of undesirable facilities, which implies that communities do
not accept any feasible solutions on the basis of “not in my backyard” (NIMBY)
and “not in anyone's backyard” (NIABY) principles. In this context, it has been
argued that the collection of relevant spatial and non spatial information can help
planners in order to include in the decision making process the points of view
of the various and numerous involved stakeholders. Higgs (
2006
) underlined the
potentiality of integrating multi-criteria approaches with GIS, in order to highlight
the opportunities and challenges facing decision makers in their effort to increase
the involvement of the public at different stages of the waste management process.
For this reason in the last years a significant proliferation of papers appeared
in the literature, showing the ability of GIS to provide crucial support in such
complex decisions, in particular in combination with multi-criteria decision making
approaches. Sumathi et al. (
2008
) identified some advantages of applying GIS in
the process of identifying appropriate waste disposal sites such as the possibility
of determining zones to be excluded according to some screening criteria, per-
forming 'what if' data analysis, investigating different potential scenarios related
to population growth and area development, as well as checking the importance
of the various influencing factors etc., handling and correlating large amounts of
complex geographical data. They used 12 thematic maps and then employed a
weighted sum aggregation function to obtain a Composite Suitability Index while
the AHP approach was used to calculate relative weights. Integration of GIS with
AHP was also proposed by other authors (Guiqin et al.
2009
;Sharifietal.
2009
;
Sener et al.
2011
). A similar approach was used by Gbanie et al. (
2013
)who
built a pair-wise comparison matrix to derive weights using the weight module in
IDRISI 15.0. Nas et al. (
2010
) proposed an alternative approach in which each
suitability criterion is represented by a factor map. Each value of a criterion is
assigned a different rank, while the maps themselves receive different weights
according to the importance of the corresponding criterion. On a different note,
Chang et al. (
2008
) used a fuzzy multicriteria approach for locating waste disposal
sites in an urban region. Zamorano et al. (
2008
) developed a method based on
the use of environmental indices calculated through GIS to provide a quantitative
assessment of the possible environmental interactions between a waste disposal site
and potentially affected environmental components. Finally, in the context of waste
management Ghose et al. (
2005
) proposed a GIS based transportation model for the
efficient management of the daily operations for transporting solid wastes.
