An integrated multi-criteria decision-making method for hazardous waste disposal site selection

With the population growth and the rapid development of tech-economy, the industrialization process of cities has accelerated the generation of a large number of hazardous wastes, which has caused serious harm to human health and the ecological environment. The location of hazardous waste disposal sites plays an important role in hazardous waste management. Because of the multiple conflicting criteria and the inherent ambiguity of experts' judgments, the location of hazardous waste disposal sites is regarded as a fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making problem. This paper proposes an integrated method, which consists of a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) and fuzzy axiomatic design (FAD), to determine the best hazardous waste disposal site. First, from the perspective of sustainability, an evaluation index system based on economic, social, and environmental criteria is built. Then, FAHP is employed to evaluate criteria weights. In the FAD application phase, the functional requirements (FRs) are determined by the five experts from different fields, and then, we use FAD to calculate the information content of alternatives and rank them. Finally, sensitivity analysis is performed on the change of criteria weight and the change of FRs, and the results show that the proposed hybrid method is a robust decision support tool for ranking alternatives. Moreover, the proposed method is flexible and can be used to solve the problem of hazardous waste disposal site selection in other developing countries or regions.