Settlement behaviors of high-food-waste-content(HFWC) and low-food-waste-content(LFWC) municipal solid wastes(MSWs) respectively from developing and developed countries were characterized and compared based on a great number of experimental datasets from references. Fresh HFWC-MSW generally has larger primary compression ratio compared to fresh LFWC-MSW, due to the release of a large amount of intra-particle water contained in food waste under additional stresses. The slopes of strain-logarithmic time curves with respect to the three secondary compression phases are characterized as "slightsteep-slight" for LFWC-MSWand "moderate-moderate-slight" for HFWC-MSW. It is difficult to distinguish the first two phases of the secondary compression in strain-logarithmic time curves for HFWC-MSW. The entropy method was built to evaluate the performance and applicability of nine published settlement models based on the settlement datasets of four large-scale experiments. The computational simplicity, the fitting performance, the prediction performance and the parametric stability were taken as the four criterions in the entropy method. Based on the evaluation results, the models proposed by Sowers et al.(1973)and Gourc et al.(2010) are recommended for predicting settlement at LFWC-MSW landfills, while the hyperbolic model and the Chen et al.(2010) model are recommended for HFWC-MSW landfills.
