Evaluating Recycling Sustainability Performance of E-waste Products

Abstract

This paper develops a new performance evaluation approach for evaluating the relative recycling sustainability performance of e-waste products in terms of their contribution to the corporate sustainability of an e-recycling company. A fuzzy pairwise comparison process is used to help make comparative assessments. A fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) is used to give an overall sustainability performance score to each e-waste product, relative to others. A new optimal weighting model is developed to determine the optimal weights for the environmental, economic, and social sustainability dimensions that reflect the best sustainability interests of the e-recycling company. An empirical study is conducted to illustrate the approach.

Keywords: Performance evaluation, sustainability, e-waste recycling, fuzzy pairwise comparison, fuzzy multicriteria decision making (MCDM), optimization, TOPSIS

JEL Classification: C61, D81, Q53, Q56