Selection of plastic solid waste treatment technology based on cumulative prospect theory and fuzzy DEMATEL

Under the global implementation of a low-carbon economy, the treatment of municipal plastic solid waste (PSW) has become an important task to be solved urgently. In the actual decision-making process of PSW treatment, the evaluation information is usually fuzzy, and the decision-makers (DMs) are bounded rational. For selecting the most appropriate PSW treatment technology, we propose a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method based on cumulative prospect theory and fuzzy decision-making trail and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL). Firstly, we construct the criteria system of PSW treatment that consists of 9 sub-criteria from the perspectives of environment, economy, society, and technology. Then, considering the interdependences and interactions between these evaluation criteria and allowing multiple stakeholders to participate in decision-making, we propose a fuzzy DEMATEL method to deal with the fuzziness of evaluation in the decision-making process and determine the weights of the evaluation criteria. Subsequently, taking into account the different opinions of different stakeholders and psychological factors such as risk preference and loss aversion of stakeholders, we aggregate the evaluation information of different stakeholders and develop the PSW treatment alternatives to rank the orders by using the proposed multi-actor cumulative prospect theory (CPT) method. We study seven alternative processes for PSW treatment by the developed model, including landfill, recycling, pyrolysis, incineration, and the combination of landfilling and recycling, landfill and incineration, and recycling and pyrolysis. According to the ranking results, we find the combination of recycling and incineration is the best treatment alternative. We take the seven PSW treatment technologies in Shanghai as the case study to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method. Through the sensitivity analysis and comparison analysis with fuzzy similarity to ideal solution (FTOPSIS) method and an acronym in Portuguese of the interactive and multi-criteria decision-making (TODIM) method, we illustrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method. This research provides significant references for the PSW treatment technology selection problems under uncertain environments and extends the methods in the decision-making field.