PMID- 20444589 OWN - NLM STAT- MEDLINE DCOM- 20110202 LR - 20181201 IS - 1879-2456 (Electronic) IS - 0956-053X (Linking) VI - 30 IP - 11 DP - 2010 Nov TI - Using an innovative criteria weighting tool for stakeholders involvement to rank MSW facility sites with the AHP. PG - 2370-82 LID - 10.1016/j.wasman.2010.04.010 [doi] AB - The main aim of this study was to verify the efficacy of using an innovative criteria weighting tool (the "priority scale") for stakeholders involvement to rank a list of suitable municipal solid waste (MSW) facility sites with the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) technique known as analytic hierarchy process (AHP). One of the main objectives of the study was to verify the behaviour of the "priority scale" with both technical and non-technical decision-makers. All over the world, the siting of MSW treatment or disposal plants is a complex process involving politicians, technicians as well as citizens, where stakeholders who are not effectively involved strongly oppose (or even obstruct) the realization of new facilities. In this study, in order to pursue both the technical (select the best site) and social aims (all the stakeholders have to give their aware contribution), the use of the "priority scale" is suggested as a tool to easily collect non-contradictory criteria preferences by the various decision-makers. Every decision-maker filled in "priority scale", which was subsequently uploaded in the AHP tool in order to indirectly calculate the individual priority of alternatives given by each stakeholder (not using group aggregation techniques). The proposed method was applied to the siting of a composting plant in an area suffering from a serious MSW emergency, which has lasted for over 15 years, in the Campania Region, in Southern Italy. The best site (the "first choice") was taken as the one that appeared the most times at the first place of each decision-maker ranking list. The involved technical and non-technical decision-makers showed the same behaviour in (indirectly) selecting the best site as well as in terms of the most appraised criteria ("absence of areas of the highest value for natural habitats and species of plants and animals"). Moreover, they showed the same AHP inconsistency ratio as well as the same behaviour in comparison with a "balanced decision-maker" (who assigns identical weights to all the considered criteria). Therefore, the proposed criteria weighting tool could be widely as well as easily used for stakeholders involvement to rank MSW facility sites (or other kinds of alternatives) with the AHP or with other MCDM techniques, taking or not into consideration group aggregation methods. CI - Copyright (c) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. FAU - De Feo, Giovanni AU - De Feo G AD - Department of Civil Engineering, University of Salerno, via Ponte don Melillo 1, 84084 Fisciano (SA), Italy. g.defeo@unisa.it FAU - De Gisi, Sabino AU - De Gisi S LA - eng PT - Journal Article DEP - 20100504 PL - United States TA - Waste Manag JT - Waste management (New York, N.Y.) JID - 9884362 SB - IM MH - Algorithms MH - Cities MH - Conservation of Natural Resources/methods MH - Decision Making, Organizational MH - Decision Support Techniques MH - Geography MH - Humans MH - Italy MH - Models, Theoretical MH - Population Density MH - Refuse Disposal/*methods MH - Waste Management/methods EDAT- 2010/05/07 06:00 MHDA- 2011/02/03 06:00 CRDT- 2010/05/07 06:00 PHST- 2010/01/20 00:00 [received] PHST- 2010/04/07 00:00 [revised] PHST- 2010/04/07 00:00 [accepted] PHST- 2010/05/07 06:00 [entrez] PHST- 2010/05/07 06:00 [pubmed] PHST- 2011/02/03 06:00 [medline] AID - S0956-053X(10)00219-9 [pii] AID - 10.1016/j.wasman.2010.04.010 [doi] PST - ppublish SO - Waste Manag. 2010 Nov;30(11):2370-82. doi: 10.1016/j.wasman.2010.04.010. Epub 2010 May 4.