The main aim of this study was to develop a procedure that minimizes the wasting of space for the siting
of hazardous waste landfills as part of a solid waste management system. We wanted to tackle the shortage
of land for waste disposal that is a serious and growing problem in most large urban regions. The
procedure combines a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) approach with a geographical information
system (GIS). The GIS was utilised to obtain an initial screening in order to eliminate unsuitable areas,
whereas the MCDA was developed to select the most suitable sites. The novelty of the proposed siting
procedure is the introduction of a new screening phase before the macro-siting step aimed at producing
a ‘‘land use map of potentially suitable areas’’ for the siting of solid waste facilities which simultaneously
takes into consideration all plant types. The issue of obtaining sites evaluations of a specific facility was
coupled with the issue of not wasting land appropriate to facilitate other types of waste management
options. In the developed case study, the use of an innovative criteria weighting tool (the ‘‘Priority Scale’’)
in combination with the Analytic Hierarchy Process was useful to easier define the priorities of the evaluation
criteria in comparison with other classic methods such as the Paired Comparison Technique in
combination with the Simple Additive Weighting method