Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Environmental Earth Sciences (2019) 78:702 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-019-8707-0 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Suitability assessment using multicriteria spatial decision support system for the existing landfill sites of Chittagong City, Bangladesh Ashish Dey 1  · Sumi Siddiqua 1  · Md. Zillur Rahman 1,2 Received: 17 November 2018 / Accepted: 23 November 2019 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract Solid waste management is a great concern in the urban areas of the developing countries. A sanitary landfill is an essential facility for efficient management of solid waste to control unpleasant odor, disease-spreading pathogens, and disposable mass. Chittagong, the second largest city in Bangladesh with an ever-increasing population, has three landfill sites within the metropolitan area. The sites are near the residential areas. The waste collection, transportation, and disposal techniques for landfilling are not well established in the city. As a result, solid wastes are randomly thrown into lowlands, rivers, streets, and open drains in an uncontrolled manner. Consequently, these waste deposits act as breeding ground of various disease vectors, such as rats, mosquitoes, flies, cockroaches, and pathogenic microorganisms. The leachate also contaminates groundwater due to improper linear design of the landfills. Therefore, the human health of the city dwellers is at risk due to the contaminated environment of the city. In the present study, the suitability of the existing landfill sites of the city has been evaluated using GIS-based multicriteria analysis technique. The importance of relevant parameters required for landfill site selection has been determined using multicriteria weighted average method. Then, the individual map of each parameter was created and overlaid all maps of different parameters to assess suitability of the landfill sites in terms of suitability score using ArcGIS. Keywords Solid waste management · Fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) · Index overlay method · Geographic information system (GIS) · Environmental contamination Introduction Municipal solid waste (MSW) management encompasses activities of collecting, dumping, recycling and compost- ing of solid waste. The problem of the MSW management is severe in developing countries where rapid growth of population, unplanned urbanization and lack of adequate resources contribute to the poor state of the MSW manage- ment practices (Gorsevski et al. 2012). Therefore, it is a great concern for the city planners and policy makers worldwide. Suitable site selection for landfill is a complex process considering varied number of factors and their interactions. However, analytical hierarchy process (Saaty 1977) can help to chronologically arrange the factors and the weights can be determined using pairwise comparison matrix (Pavlikakis and Tsihrintzis 2003). Fuzzy membership function (Charnprath- eep et al. 1997) is another useful tool to standardize various survey data. The multicriteria weighted average (WA) method (Hasan et al. 2009) was found very suitable to determine the overall suitability score (Kontos et al. 2005; Geneletti 2010; Moeinaddini et al. 2010). The overall suitability score of an individual landfill depicts the suitability of the landfills. The term suitability score describes the risk potential of the land- fills. Lower suitability score means higher risk index. The geographic information system (GIS) tool is widely used to select suitable sites for landfill (Guiqin et al. 2009; Şener et al. 2010; Ekmekcioglu et al. 2010; Moeinaddini et al. 2010; Tavares et al. 2011; Effat and Hegazy 2012; Gorsevski et al. 2012; Eskandari et al. 2012; Nazari et al. 2012; Torabi-Kaveh et al. 2016; Demesouka et al. 2019). Individual map layers are created and overlaid over each other to observe the overall suitability map to depict the risk in terms of suitability score of the landfill sites. Multicriteria spatial decision support system (MC-SDSS) has emerged as an important tool for landuse suitability * Sumi Siddiqua sumi.siddiqua@ubc.ca 1 School of Engineering, The University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, Kelowna, BC V1V 1V7, Canada 2 Department of Disaster Science and Management, University of Dhaka, Dhaka 1000, Bangladesh