Resources, Conservation and Recycling 35 (2002) 215–227 Public opinion and siting solid waste landﬁlls in Kuwait Anwar F. Al-Yaqout *, P.A. Koushki, Mohamed F. Hamoda Department of Ciil Engineering, Kuwait Uniersity, P.O. Box 5969, Safat 13060, Kuwait Received 3 April 2001; accepted 21 September 2001 Abstract Siting municipal solid waste landﬁlls in Kuwait had not considered public concerns about the location of such facilities. Kuwait Municipality has disposed urban waste in abandoned sand quarries for the past 20 years in an unplanned fashion. Due to this improper siting criteria, environmental and health problems have risen from old landﬁlls that are located in residential areas. In an effort to help responsible decision-makers in assessing public support for siting landﬁlls a structured, yet simple, questionnaire was designed and distributed to a random sample of heads of households. Statistical techniques were employed to examine trends and relationships between the sample public responses concerning landﬁll siting criteria. The ﬁndings of the research indicated that a signiﬁcant percentage of the responding sample did not know about the various landﬁll impacts and less than 50% were aware of the negative impacts of landﬁlls on the public health and the environment. The visual appear- ance of the landﬁll scored the lowest impact in the opinion of the sample public while the most important aspect in siting a landﬁll appeared to be its economic consideration. The research ﬁndings also directed attention to the important role that the media could play in increasing public awareness. Results from the cross-classiﬁcation analysis demonstrated the existence of differences in awareness levels according to age, nationality, martial status, education, and occupation of the responding sample. Statistically, these differences were signiﬁcant at the 95% signiﬁcance level, as supported by the test of the -square. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Landﬁll; Public opinion; Siting criteria; Solid waste management; Statistical analysis www.elsevier.com/locate/resconrec * Corresponding author. Tel.: +965-481-7240; fax: +965-481-7524. E-mail address: alyaqout@civil.kuniv.edu.kw (A.F. Al-Yaqout). 0921-3449/02/$ - see front matter © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII:S0921-3449(01)00111-2