Location of stabilised waste storage facilities: The case of Francophone Switzerland

The search for sites to locate stabilised special waste storage facilities (SWSF) falls in the realm of hazardous/non-desirable facility location problems. The implementation of such projects is often difficult given their multi-stakeholder and multi-criteria dimensions. They are frequently disputed or even blocked. In this paper, the authors present the process developed for the selection of SWSF sites in French-speaking Switzerland. This process, which has been in progress since 1987, is a multidisciplinary iterative approach that incorporates multicriteria decision making techniques like ELECTRE I. The strength and originality of this approach lie in the fact that both the technical and socio-political aspects of the problem are taken into account simultaneously. This enables the decision maker to identify the players that have to be consulted and to define over time the type of decisions, both technical and non-technical, that need to be taken as well as the process to be followed for each of them.