Abstract:
Municipal waste in the Kingdom of Bahrain is one of priority issue that needs to be resolved. Landfilling is the current technology used for ending up all types of waste, where Askar landfill is the main and only one used for landfilling all municipal wastes in Bahrain. Askar landfill reached its end use capacity by 2016, however it's still operating and receiving municipal wastes. This research aims to find out an alternative site for the existing landfill to be used at the current period and for near future, while Ministry of Works and Municipalities Affairs, and Supreme Council for Environment in Bahrain are thinking seriously to find a proper solution and sustainable technology rather than Landfilling. Five landfill alternatives located in the blue zone, next to Askar, of the land use map of Bahrain Vision for year 2030, and eleven decision criteria have been proposed. The study applies two analytical approaches to establish the best landfill. The adopted approaches are Fuzzy Set analysis and Analytical Hierarchal Process analysis. Both approaches are based on multi-criteria decision, Analytical Hierarchal Process simply links the alternatives with the ranges of distances for each criterion, while Fuzzy Set relies on the distances of these criteria with respect to the five alternatives and their inter relationship among the criteria and the alternatives. The results for both methodologies are almost the same as the ranking of the five alternatives for both methodologies are similar with slight difference in landfill positions 3 and 4, where the best alternative is found to be landfill no. (3), which is located in the middle of the blue zone below the existing landfill at Askar.