Waste-to-energy, municipal solid waste treatment, and best available technology: Comprehensive evaluation by an interval-valued fuzzy multi-criteria decision making method

The treatment of municipal solid waste (MSW) has become an urgently important task of many countries. This objective of this study is to present a novel group multi-attribute decision analysis method for prioritizing the MSW treatment alternatives based on the interval-valued fuzzy set theory. This study allows multiple stakeholders to participate in the process of decision-making and they are also allowed to use linguistic variables to rate the alternatives and determine the weights of the evaluation criteria. The interval-valued fuzzy group decision making trail and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method was developed to determine the weights of the evaluation criteria by considering the independent relationships among these criteria. The multi-actor interval-valued fuzzy grey relational analysis was developed to rank the waste-to-energy scenarios. Four alternative processes for MSW treatment including landfill, anaerobic digestion, incineration, and gasification were studied by the developed model, and the results reveal that the developed model can successfully help the stakeholders to determine the priority sequence of the alternative MSW treatment scenarios.