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Abstract
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Selecting appropriate locations for municipal solid waste (MSW) management facilities, such as landfills, is an important issue in rapidly developing regions. Multiple alternatives and evaluation attributes need to be analyzed for finalizing the locations of these facilities. Selection of a landfill site in an urban area is a captious issue due to the involvement of multitude of parameters. The decisive parameters are of environmental, economic and social in nature, some of them conflicting, which makes landfill site selection a tedious and complex process. Multi-attribute decision making (MADM) approaches are found to be very effective for ranking several potential locations and hence selecting the best among them based on the identified attributes. Therefore, this study presents a two-stage MADM model that also accounts for all possible combinations of locations. This study evaluates economical, environmental, social and technical attributes based on realistic conditions. Based on the results 15 attributes are first identified through a comprehensive literature review and with the help of municipal officials during field surveys. These attributes are categorized into four types, i.e., economic, technical, environmental and social based on their respective propensity. In the second step, a statistical analysis questionnaire was distributed among the study population and Cronbach's alpha was explained for all four main factors of the study. Therefore, in the last step, using the nonlinear analysis method, the rank of all research variables was calculated. Based on the results of this study, the technical variable was ranked first, the economic variable was ranked second and also the environmental and social variable was ranked third. This article has three theoretical, practical and technical contributions. Also, this article provides a clear explanation of the theoretical contribution related to the accumulated knowledge, both in the introduction section and in the
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