A multicriteria group decision making approach for selecting e-waste recycling company

Electronic waste (e-waste) is found not only the fastest growing waste streams but also contains a range of hazardous substances. Due to the hazardous material substances, these e-wastes may cause environmental problems if they are not treated, managed or recycled properly. Therefore it is crucial that the appropriate e-waste recycling company is selected to carry out the best available treatment, recovery and recycling. This paper presents a multicriteria group decision making approach for selecting the most suitable e-waste recycling company. To effectively model the decision makers’ subjective assessments, linguistic terms approximated by triangular fuzzy numbers are used. A new algorithm is developed to take into account the decision makers’ level of confidence level in their subjective assessments. The concept based on the absolute area and the degree of deviation of a fuzzy number is applied for generating an overall preference value for every alternative across all criteria. An example is presented to show the applicability of the proposed approach.