Landfill NIMBY and Systems Engineering: A Paradigm for Urban Planning

A solid waste management crisis exists in many parts of the US as a result of the inability to site new landfills to replace the consumed capacity of existing landfills. Municipal solid waste (MSW) landfills can, and usually do, have a significant adverse impact on the individuals who own property in, reside in, or otherwise use, areas near the landfill. This leads those who stand to be adversely affected by a landfill to take a justifiable "NIMBY" (Not in My Back Yard) position against it. In the past and even today the approach that is used for siting landfills is to select one or more specifically rural areas as candidate sites and then through a contrived process, force one or more of those sites on those who own or use nearby properties. If those in the potential sphere of influence of the landfill, which is often several miles from its location, are sufficiently politically powerful or have sufficient financial resources to actively oppose the siting of the landfill in their region, they can usually be successful in stopping the landfill from being sited in their area. Some jurisdictions purport to involve the public in the site-selection process by appointing a "citizens advisory committee" (CAC). The CAC is then "allowed" to select and rank the parameters of concern with respect to the landfill. Based on an arbitrarily developed numeric scoring system, various potential candidate sites are ranked and those with the highest ranking are selected as the "best available sites." While the site-selection process and the design of the landfill should be coordinated and concurrent activities, they are typically pursued sequentially which contributes to the unreliability of the process. While this process appears superficially to have a technical aura about it, and public participation components in it, it is highly arbitrary and frequently capricious in its implementation. Rarely does this process lead to "the best available site" that would enable the development of a particular landfill at the particular location without a significant adverse impact on the current owners and users of nearby lands, future generations who may own or use those lands, and those who would use groundwaters hydraulically connected to the area at some time in the future. There is need to take a significantly different approach to landfill siting than is being used today. Systems engineering provides a potential methodology for rigorous incorporation of the various factors that need to be considered in developing solid waste management capacity for a region. This paper reviews the issues of site selection for MSW management, legitimate NIMBY concerns, and how systems engineering could be used to more appropriately select a site/method for MSW management for a region.