sanitary landfill is one of the most common and cost-effective methods of waste disposal, and selecting an appropriate site requires careful consideration of environmental factors. The Dehgolan watershed in Kurdistan Province, with a population of over 64,000 (approximately 29.185 per thousand in urban areas), faces environmental and health challenges due to the lack of suitable sanitary landfill locations. The aim of this study is to identify appropriate sites for sanitary landfill placement with an emphasis on land subsidence in the Dehgolan plain. For this purpose, Sentinel-1 radar data over a five-year period (2020–2024) were used to extract and map land subsidence. Subsequently, 21 influential layers were selected across the domains of climate, geology, geomorphology, hydrology, and human activities. To weight the criteria, two complementary approaches were applied: the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), as an expert-based multi-criteria decision-making method, and the CRITIC model, as a statistical and objective method for determining criterion importance. The results indicate that the Dehgolan plain experiences an average annual subsidence rate of 3.5 cm, predominantly occurring in the central, western, and southwestern parts of the plain. Additionally, the consistency ratios of the final weighted layers for sanitary landfill site selection in Tirast software were estimated at 0.07 and 0.06. Findings from the two models revealed that the percentage differences across classes were minimal, with the largest discrepancy observed in the “unsuitable” class (1.54%) and the smallest in the “very unsuitable” class (0.3%). Ultimately, six suitable zones for sanitary landfill placement were identified, among which sites No. 1 and No. 3 were selected as optimal options. The final analysis also indicated that the selected landfill locations are mostly situated in areas with low to moderate subsidence, suggesting the relative stability of these sites compared to regions with severe subsidence.