Selection of hazardous waste disposal company with multi-criteria decision making methods

The whole society, especially institutions and organizations, is responsible for the protection and improvement of the environment. The produce, collection and disposal of hazardous waste is a costly and time-consuming process subject to numerous environmental, social, technical and legal requirements. Wastes produced in hazardous waste generators are stored and delivered to a licensed hazardous waste disposal company with minimum legal requirements. Hospital management is faced with the problem of which disposal company to choose for the disposal of hazardous waste produced in the hospital. In hospitals, this choice is made by relying on the subjective judgment and previous experience of the managers. However, non-objective methods should be preferred instead of this objective choice. In this study, the importance level of the criteria that are effective in choosing a hazardous waste disposal company was determined by multi-criteria decision-making methods. Considering these importance levels, the most suitable disposal company was determined by the DEA method. In order to verify this model, disposal company selection was carried out with the BWM-TOPSIS method. During the validation, the AHP-DEA and BWM-TOPSIS results were tested statistically with Spearman's Correlation Coefficient.