Selection of sustainable construction material from recycled waste plastics by q-rung orthopair fuzzy SWARA-MABAC approach

Abstract

Recycling of waste plastics and agro-industrial waste for the development of sustainable polymeric composites is recognized as a viable approach to overcome the detrimental environmental effects of plastics waste. Despite of immense potential of sustainable composites in the Circular Economy (CE), its implementation is still insignificant due to the lack of an effective material selection approach. The existence of several influencing aspects in the process of material selection considers it a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem. In the present work, an Aggregation Operator (AO) based integrated Stepwise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis (SWARA) and Multi-attributive Border Approximation Area Comparison (MABAC) has been proposed to deal with the issues of material selection for polymer based sustainable composites. Moreover, q-rung orthopair fuzzy numbers (q-ROPFNs) have been implemented to tackle the uncertainty in the information. The effectiveness of the proposed approach has been confirmed by different comparative and sensitivity investigations. The developed composites have shown excellent properties whereas the responses of the materials vary invariably with compositions. The proposed method has identified the amalgamation of 10 wt percentage of rice husk ash and 10 wt percentage of sand with 80 wt percentage of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) as an appropriate material for the development of sustainable floor tiles as the composites resulted to optimum mechanical performances and minimum abrasive wear. The proposed model gives reliable and robust results and is sensitive to the criteria weights and mathematical parameters. The outcome of the research has exposed that the suggested mathematical approach can be effectively applied for material selection of sustainable polymeric composites for different applications.