Incineration as a sustainable waste management option in Southeast Europe

Abstract

Decision making process in complex environmental problems often involves large number of independent and sometimes irreconcilable factors. Analysing and comparing environmental, technological, economic and socio-political factors, while having in mind all stakeholders views, seems impossible unless supported with a formal decision making framework, which would facilitate understanding of all processes and influential factors related to decision making, including all criteria's and confronting interests which are specific to the available alternatives for a problem solution. Having in mind importance of efficient and objective decision making process, the paper gives general description of the MCDA methods used, and through a case study of landfill site selection process elaborates possible MCDA methods application in a waste management problems. Case study use a real data from a Central Eastern part of Macedonia and provide step by step example of using the AHP method as a tool of choice. Results clearly indicate that AHP can provide proper decision making support, allowing optimal solution selection through inclusion of different and otherwise incomparable criterions like the environmental (flora, fauna, visual aspects, cultural heritage...), technical (geological setting, hydrology, odours, accidents...), planning (location compared to the current land usage, infrastructure, future land usage...) and economic criteria's (investment and operational costs).