ABSTRACT The rapid growth of municipal solid waste generation, particularly in emerging economies, has intensified environmental and public health challenges associated with inadequate final disposal. Although sanitary landfills remain the most widely adopted solution, inappropriate site selection can result in long‐term environmental degradation and social conflicts, often exacerbated by fragmented decision‐making approaches. To address this issue, this study aims to propose a structured and replicable decision‐support roadmap for landfill site selection. The methodological framework was developed through a systematic literature review—analyzing 44 studies to identify international methodological trends—and subsequently validated using empirical evidence from real‐world case studies in Brazil. The results reveal the predominance of geospatial and multi‐criteria approaches as the core analytical basis for landfill siting. Furthermore, the validation process demonstrated that the alignment between the proposed roadmap and practical applications is partial: it is highly consistent during the initial planning and diagnostic stages, but highlights a significant practical gap in the final decision and implementation phases. Ultimately, the proposed roadmap offers an original, adaptable framework that bridges the gap between methodological research and practical decision‐making, serving as both a reflection of current practices and a normative guide particularly relevant to the territorial realities of emerging economies.
Barbosa et al. (2026) studied this question.