Locating a waste treatment facility by multicriteria analysis

We describe an application of multicriteria decision aid to the location of a waste treatment facility in eastern Finland. In Finland, the Act on Environmental Impact Assessment Procedure requires that when the amount of waste to be dealt with in a facility exceeds 20,000 tons per year, the process of environmental impact assessment (EIA) must be performed. In addition, the opinions of citizens and different interest groups need to be heard. Generally, EIA requires many different factors to be dealt with. Therefore the use of some multicriteria decision aid may be helpful to preserve the information obtained through the EIA in the decision-making process. The alternative locations for the facility were considered based on 14 criteria by 28 decision makers. The present paper makes use of the PROMETHEE decision aid, which was found to fit well with certain constraints in this type of problem with multiple criteria and multiple decision makers.