Sustainability evaluation for phosphorus mines using a hybrid multi-criteria decision making method

Considering the mounting conflict of economic growth and environmental destruction, promoting sustainable development has become inevitable in many industries, especially for mines. This study focuses on developing suitable approaches to assess the sustainability for phosphorus mines. First, a comprehensive sustainability assessment criteria scheme is designed. For quantitative criteria, real numbers are utilized to signify objective values. For qualitative criteria, triangular fuzzy numbers (TFNs) are used to represent subjective fuzzy cognition of decision makers. Meanwhile, a variable-weight model is built to calculate sub-criteria weights. Thereafter, the traditional multi-attributive border approximation area comparison (MABAC) approach is modified with hybrid assessment data (i.e., real numbers and TFNs) to obtain the final evaluation results. Last, an example of evaluating the sustainability for four phosphorus mines in China is studied to justify the feasibility of the hybrid multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method. Moreover, the advantages of our approach are revealed by the sensitivity and comparative analyses. The results show that our approach is dependable to deal with such hybrid MCDM problems and can provide effective guidance for sustainable development management.