Establishing an interval-valued fuzzy decision-making method for sustainable selection of healthcare waste treatment technologies in the emerging economies

Healthcare services provided by hospitals and clinics inevitably produce waste that may hazardous to the environment and society. However, there is a lack of an effective and comprehensive evaluation framework that takes uncertainty and fuzziness into account to assess healthcare waste treatment technologies in the emerging economies. The objective of this paper is to present a new integrated multi-criteria decision-making method based on interval-valued fuzzy DEMATEL (Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) and interval-valued fuzzy TOPSIS for evaluating healthcare waste treatment technologies in the emerging economies from a sustainability perspective. In this study, the decision makers are allowed to determine the weights of the evaluation criteria and prioritize the alternatives using linguistic variables. The weights of the evaluation criteria are determined by the interval-valued fuzzy DEMATEL method, and the prioritization of the alternatives is determined by the interval-valued fuzzy TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution) method. Four alternatives for healthcare waste treatment technologies including incineration, steam sterilization, microwave and landfill are studied, and the results show that our established method is effective to help the decision-makers to determine the prioritization of the alternatives for healthcare waste treatment technologies.