Land Suitability Analysis: Landfill Siting

Abstract

While land suitability analysis is becoming a standard tool in environmental inventory and analysis, its application to sanitary landfull siting has been limited due to uncertainty about the factors which should he mapped, criteria for determining the relative degree of suitability for each factor, and limitations in an agency's file of available environmental data. This paper examines each of these aspects in comparing two case studies, Kenton and Campbell Counties, Kentucky, and Dane County, Wisconsin, which utilized areawide land suitability analysis as an element in sanitary landfill siting studies. Each of the approaches is briefly compared with techniques described in the literature, and the advantages and disadvantages of the techniques used are described.