**1. Introduction**

The construction of sanitary landfills that comply with environmental legislation and that reduce the undesired effects of current practices is one of the main municipal solid wastes (MSW) management priorities in Tunisia. The first and most important step in planning solid

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

waste landfill is the site selection for solid waste disposal [1]. Landfill site selection is a complicated, complex, monotonous, requiring evaluation of various criteria. Among those criteria economic, environmental and social property are often considered for attractive the scheduling process and for setting guidelines that reduce public health risks, impact to the environment, cost to facility users and inefficiencies connected with other services [2–4]. As such, it evidently requires the processing of a massive amount of spatial data [5]. Various landfill siting techniques have been developed for this purpose. In the last few years, geographic information systems (GIS) have been increasingly used to facilitate and lower the cost of the process of selecting sites for sanitary landfills [6]. A number of GIS methods and techniques have been proposed to evaluate suitable landfill locations [1, 2, 7–9]. Some of those techniques take advantage of GIS-based multicriteria evaluation (MCE) [1, 2, 7, 8, 5, 10] and fuzzy set theory [2, 4, 11]. In MCE, the weighted linear combination (WLC) is one of the most popular methods because of its simplicity [12]. Several WLC-based approaches for landfill siting can be found in the literature [5, 11, 13]. In the WLC procedure, analytical hierarchy process (AHP) [14] is often applied to elicit criteria weights and to enhanced represent interaction between criteria and alternatives [6]. In AHP, weights are computed based on pairwise judgments and checked for consistency. Because pairwise judgments are often biased and inconsistent, acceptable consistency ratio (CR) often requires iterative revisions of the pairwise judgments before the final weights are computed.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the suitability of the study region to optimally site a landfill for MSW Ariana using AHP and WLC in a GIS environment.
