Abstract
Babylon Governorate is located in the middle of Iraq and includes five major districts called Qadhaa. It occupies an area of 5315 km2 with population of 2,092,998 in 2015. The process of selecting landfill site is considered complicated task related to many factors and regulations. Currently, there is no landfill site in Babylon Governorate that fulfils the scientific and environmental criteria. Therefore, in this study fifteen of suitable criteria were selected. These criteria are: groundwater depth, urban canters, rivers, villages, soil types, elevation, agriculture, roads lands use slope, land use, archaeological sites, power lines, gas pipelines, oil pipelines and railways. Then these criteria were used in the GIS (geographic information system), which has a high ability to manage and analyse various data. In addition, the AHP (analytical hierarchy process) method was used to derive the weightings of criteria through using a matrix of pair-wise comparison. After that the weighted linear combination (WLC) method was used to obtain the suitability index map for candidate landfill sites. Ten suitable candidate sites for landfill were selected (two for each District), where all these sites satisfied the scientific and environmental criteria which were adopted in this study. The areas of the selected sites were adequate to accommodate solid waste from 2020 until 2030.
Keywords: Landfill; GIS; AHP; Babylon; Iraq
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