E-waste circular economy decision-making: a comprehensive approach for sustainable operation management in the UK

Abstract

E-waste generation has broadly increased worldwide and is called intense pressure on sustainable practice implementation firms by recycling and redesigning the products. Thus, e-waste operation management in developed countries like the UK has become the top priority and is subjected to multiple sustainable circular economies (CE) contributing factors, including social, technical, environmental, and governmental policies. The authorized decision-makers can benefit from a well-established systematic decision-making tool to assess and evaluate the e-waste operation management considering the potential CE contributing factors. An extensive literature overview is expanded to identify the most relevant and influential contributing factors to e-waste CE. The city of London Metropolitan has been selected as the case location. In this regard, it is necessary to utilize an advanced multi-criteria decision-making tool to explore the interdependency and causality of CE-relevant factors. The present study proposed an innovative decision-making approach to address the multiple contributing factors of causality, interdependency, data, and model uncertainty in practice. It uses the step-wise weighted influence nonlinear gauge system method integrated with Fermatean fuzzy linguistic sets. This study conducted a sensitivity analysis to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed decision-making approach in e-waste operation management. The results are promising, clearly demonstrating the framework’s competence. The CE index, crucial in designing e-waste operation management strategies, was calculated to be 2.8036. Among the various factors analyzed, “Environmental Management Systems” emerged as the most significant driving factor. This underscores the critical need to improve environmental management systems within e-waste operations.