Landfill Sitting by Two Methods in Al-Qasim, Babylon, Iraq and Comparing Them Using Change Detection Method

Abstract

The selecting of a site for landfill is considered as a difficult process because many criteria should be involved. The main aim of establishing a landfill is to protect the human and environment. Al-Qasim district is considered as the study area in this work. It is one of the main districts in Babylon Governorate, Iraq. There is no systematic site as landfill that fulfil the environmental and scientific criteria in this area. Therefore, the most important fifteen criteria that suit ed the environmental requirements were selected in the current study. These criteria are: groundwater depth, urban centers, rivers, villages, soil types, elevation, roads agricultural land use, slope, land use, archaeological sites, power lines, gas pipelines, oil pipelines and railways. Two methods of multi criteria decision making AHP (analytical hierarchy process) and SRS (straight rank sum) were applied to obtain the weights of criteria in dissimilar styles. The raster maps of the selected criteria were prepared and analyzed within the GIS software. Then, the change detection method was implemented to compare the two output raster maps resulted from AHP and SRS methods. Two appropriate candidate sites for landfill were selected to accommodate the cumulative solid waste until the year 2030 in Qasim district. The areas of these sites were 2.766 km 2 and 2.055 km 2 respectively.