Multi-criteria sustainability assessment of urban sludge treatment technologies: Method and case study

Abstract

This study aims at developing a sustainability assessment framework for assessing the technologies for the treatment of urban sewage sludge based on the logarithmic fuzzy preference programming based fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (LFPPFAHP) and extension theory. LFPPFAHP was employed to determine the weights of the criteria for sustainability assessment, and extension theory was used to prioritize the alternative technologies for the treatment of urban sewage sludge and grade their sustainability performances. An illustrative case including three technologies (compositing, incineration, and resource utilization) was studied by the proposed method, and compositing, incineration, and resource utilization are recognized as “Moderately Sustainable”, “Not Sustainable”, and “Highly Sustainable”, respectively. The sustainability sequence in the descending order is resource utilization, compositing and incineration, and the result is consistent to that determined by the sum weighted method.