A methodology for landfill location using geographic information systems: a Colombian regional case

The regions' economic growth and accelerated development have created high solid waste production rates; such waste is disposed of in many localities in places without any technical and/or environmental measures having been taken. This paper presents guidelines for locating landfills by combining geographic information systems (GIS) with analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and simple additive weighting (SAW). The methodology so developed was applied to the regional case of Tame in the Arauca department in Colombia; a scenario involving Colombian legislation was compared to the proposed methodology. The results showed that there were significant differences in estimating area availability. Regarding 95% of maximum weighting (1,000 points), the proposed methodology was 81% more restrictive than the Colombian legislation.