Application of ISM for the Major Barriers Analysis of Medical Waste Reverse Logistics

The medical waste management is of great importance due to its potential environmental hazards and public health risks. Nowadays, more and more scholars and hospitals start to focus on the possibility and feasibility of adopting reverse logistics to improve the effectiveness and economy of the medical waste management. However, before the implementation, decision-makers should first analyze what barriers they will face and which are the key factors they should pay more attention to. The objective of this study is to identify the major barriers in medical waste reverse logistics, and develop the Interpretive Structural Modeling(ISM) system, one theory of systems engineering, to rank these barriers and find the interaction among them. The results of this paper will provide some practical information for the implementation of medical waste reverse logistics.