The Sustainability Evaluation of Masks Based on the Integrated Rank Sum Ratio and Entropy Weight Method

Abstract

Due to the seriousness of COVID-19, masks are considered to be as a key and effective device to cut off the spread of viruses and are widely used by people, such as doctors and patients. Hundreds of millions of masks used worldwide in daily life will inevitably cause huge pollution and damage to the environment. However, existing research has not yet provided a method to simultaneously evaluate the economic, environmental, and social aspects of sustainable design of masks, which brings great barriers and challenges for designers to make sustainability decisions on masks and consumers’ behavioral decisions on mask purchases. Consequently, on the basis of principles of sustainability evaluation of masks, this work evaluates ten masks of different materials (including two newly designed masks) by using a novel hybrid of rank-sum ratio and entropy weight method. The results indicate that some disposable masks also show better sustainability than reusable masks, and in addition, the integrated rank-sum ratio and entropy weight method can effectively realize the sustainability evaluation of masks. The main contribution is to furnish an effective decision-making reference for sustainability evaluation of masks while greatly reducing the negative impacts of masks on the environment during the epidemic.

A grey comprehensive evaluation model for wheat quality incorporating PCA-EWM

“…To further compare the superiority-inferiority relationships of different batches of wheat, and to verify the reasonableness and accuracy of the results of wheat quality evaluation by the model in this paper, the ranking degree of each batch of wheat was measured using Equation 13 to obtain the ranking results of each batch of wheat quality by the PCA-EWM-grey system (GS) evaluation model constructed in this paper. Meanwhile, the PCA-EWM-TOPSIS evaluation model (Liu et al, 2021) and PCA-rank sum ratio (RSR) evaluation model (Lu et al, 2022) were used as comparative models to calculate and rank the superiority and inferiority relationships of each batch of wheat, respectively. Among them, the PCA-EWM-TOPSIS evaluation model used the similarity proximity C as the scoring basis, and the PCA-RSR evaluation model used the RSR value as the scoring basis.…”