A sustainability assessment methodology for prioritizing the technologies of groundwater contamination remediation

More and more groundwater has been polluted recently, and technologies for groundwater contamination remediation are of vital importance; however, it is usually difficult for the users to select the most suitable technology among multiple alternatives. In order to address this, this study aims at developing a sustainability assessment framework for prioritizing the technologies for groundwater contamination remediation by combining the concept of sustainability and multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method. A criterion system which consists of six criteria in three aspects has been proposed for sustainability assessment of technologies for groundwater contamination remediation, and a novel MCDM method by combining the logarithmic fuzzy preference programming based fuzzy analytic hierarchy process and the improved ELECTRE method has been developed for prioritizing the alternatives. In order to illustrate the developed methodology, four technologies including pump-treat (P&T), monitored natural attenuation (MNA), permeable reactive barriers (PRB), and air sparging (AS) have been studied, and the results show that the proposed methodology is feasible for prioritizing the technologies for groundwater contamination remediation for the stakeholders/decision-makers.