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.