Municipal solid waste management strategy selection: Multi-criteria decision making under uncertainty

Abstract

For decades, due to the increasing generation of waste and its negative environmental impacts, efficient municipal solid waste management (MSWM) has become a major concern of sustainable development. On the other hand, selecting an appropriate strategy remains a critical issue for municipal authorities without applying a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach. This study aims to select the best MSWM strategy from five potential MSW management strategies under various factors that influence waste strategy selection, such as economic, social, technical, and environmental factors. This study used three fuzzy integrated MCDM methods, namely the Decision-Making Trail and Evaluation Laboratory (DMATEL), the Analytic Network Process (ANP) and the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to select best MSWM strategies. The study used data from a survey of experts who had knowledge of waste management. The survey data was then analyzed using the DMATEL, ANP and TOPSIS methods under a fuzzy environment. The Fuzzy DEMATEL method is used to identify the causal relationships among the criteria and sub-criteria, while ANP is applied to determine the relative weights of MSWM strategy selection sub-criterion. Finally, TOPSIS is used to rank the waste management strategies depending on established sub-criteria. The result of fuzzy TOPSIS demonstrated that recycling of municipal solid waste is the best alternative which has the highest closeness coefficient followed by reuse. Thus, the result of this study revealed that MSWM strategies are ranked as: waste recycling (A1), reuse (A2), reduce (A1), energy recovery (A4), and disposal (A5), with closeness coefficient values of 0.80, 0.61, 0.60, 0.47, and 0.17, respectively.