The overestimated risks for imported waste paper: Based on grey interval multi-criteria decision making under...

China has prohibited the imported waste paper (IWP) from 2021 due to environmental burdens, its reasonability was doubtful owing to lacking a comprehensive evaluation. Previous studies just assessed the potential risks caused by pollutants from the upstream processes, ignoring the actual risks from the actual production processes, especially the generated toxic pollutants (heavy metals, PCDD/Fs, PAEs and DL-PCBs). Herein, ITOPSIS-IVIKOR-GRA incorporating distance and correlation by combining grey distance, grey group utility and individual regret, was developed to prioritize the risks of four typical recycled paper production by taking potential/actual health and ecological risks as criteria. Results showed that compared to domestic waste paper, using IWP as raw materials can increase risks for deinking paper due to its lower whiteness, but can decrease for non-deinking paper due to its higher fiber quality and less impurity. Meanwhile, the weights were optimized by the minimum deviation and weight risk coefficient, manifesting that actual non-carcinogenic and carcinogenic risks were the two most critical criteria. Comparison and sensitivity analysis demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness. Our research showed the irrationality of policy from comprehensive risk assessment, meanwhile, some suggestions (e.g., establishing a standardized recycling system and strengthening supervision) were proposed based on different WP.