Impact Assessment of Candidate Landfill Sites for Zanjan City Using Improved RIAM Method

Subject Areas : environmental management

Ghazal Monzavi ¹ (Graduate Student, Department of Environment, Faculty of Natural Resources, Tarbiat Modares University)
Abdolrassoul Salmanmahiny ² (Associate Professor, Department of the Environmental Sciences, Gorgan University of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources)
Habibollah Yunesi ³ (Asst. Prof., Department of Environment, Faculty of Natural Resources, Tarbiat Modares University)

Received: 2010-06-29 Accepted : 2011-03-03 Published : 2015-09-23

Keywords: Landfill, Zanjan, Rapid Impact Assessment Matrix, Analytic Hierarchy Process,

Abstract :

Background and Objectives: In Zanjan city, no research has been conducted for selection of asuitable site for sanitary disposal of solid waste. At the moment, a traditional landfill site is used forsolid wastes disposal in the vicinity of the city. The site has high potential to pollute the environmentdue to the open air practice of waste disposal. Hence, it is urgent to select a site for this purpose fromamongst the proposed ones.Unsuitable landfill sites may have many negative impacts. Using environmental impact assessmentcan highly help mitigate the negative effects and arrive at a sound environmental management plan.RIAM is an approach that guarantees a sound and at the same time fast and clear evaluation of themain environmental impacts of development projects. This approach has many advantages and somedisadvantages, and of the latter the subjectivity has been targeted in this research.We used the RIAM that was upgraded with the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to lower thesubjectivity implicit in the scoring of the impacts and introduce more objectivity to the process.Method of study: We used suggested landfill sites in Zanjan City and assessed their environmentalimpacts through integration of AHP and RIAM methods. Comparing the effects of each of theselandfills on the environment helped us in selecting the least impacting one.Results: In the process, we integrated the RIAM with the AHP and found the present landfill site stillholds some edge over other suggested sites. The possibility of improving the original RIAM methodwith the AHP was also shown to be applicable and promising.Discussion and conclusion: This study shows that RIAM method can be upgraded throughintegration with the AHP method. The integration transformed challenging ideas on the scoring of theimpacts and provided an opportunity for inclusion of expert opinion and greatly enhancedachievement of a unified impact score.

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