Sustainable planning of e-waste recycling activities using fuzzy multicriteria decision making

This paper develops a new approach to sustainable planning of e-waste recycling activities for meeting the best sustainability interests of an e-recycling company. A fuzzy multicriteria decision making algorithm is developed to evaluate alternative recycling activities of an e-waste recycling job in terms of their corporate sustainability performance on identified sustainability criteria under the environmental, economic, and social dimensions. A series of optimal weighting models are developed to determine the optimal weights for the three sustainability dimensions and their associated criteria. In consideration of an e-recycling company's subjective sustainability preferences, the optimal weights reflect the best corporate sustainability performance of the e-waste products processed by the company under its current operational settings. The approach represents an original contribution to the methodological development of weighting the three corporate sustainability dimensions for planning decisions. In practice, it provides e-recycling companies with a proactive mechanism for incorporating the concept of corporate sustainability into their regular planning decisions. An empirical study on a leading e-recycling company is conducted to illustrate how the approach works.