Evaluation of healthcare waste treatment technologies via hibrid HFLTS&MABAC approach

The amount of healthcare waste produced is increasing day by day with the demand for health services due to the ever-increasing population and the new health institutions established. Disposable medical supplies are also one of the reasons for the increase in the amount of waste. Developing countries share the common responsibility of trying to reduce the risks carried by medical wastes as much as possible as they require special treatment. In order to solve this problem, it is extremely important to select the most appropriate method from the healthcare waste treatment methods. It is a very important group decision problem to choose the best method among the healtcare waste treatment technologies by taking into consideration the multiple conflicting criteria and the opinions of a group of experts. The Hesitant Fuzzy Linguistic Term Set (HFLTS) method, which allows qualitative and quantitative criteria used in alternative evaluation to be assessed in a flexible and close way to unstable nature of the human being through a context-free grammar set of linguistic terms is a set of linguistic terms that has recently become the focus of attention. The Multi-Attributive Border Approximation Area Comparison (MABAC) method is a Multi-criteria Decision Making Method (MCDM) that is used to alternatively evaluate the distance to the border approximation area by simple process steps. This study proposes a new HFLTS & MABAC method is proposed, which is a hybrid of HFLTS and MABAC methods. Firstly, evaluation criteria of Healthcare Waste Treatment Technology which exists in the literature has been examined and ergonomic criteria has been added to these criteria different from the literature. Subsequently, the main criterion and the subcriterion weights have been obtained by the multi-criteria HFLTS method and the best technology has been determined by the MABAC method. They have been compared to the results obtained by HFLTS&TOPSIS and HFLTS&VIKOR methods to demonstrate the validity of the method. As a result of the calculation, the main criteria with the highest weight were economic factors followed by environmental factors, while the sub criteria had gas waste and environmental impacts and operating cost criteria. Consequently, Sterilization technology which costs less than other methods, is sensitive to environmental protection and has high disposal efficiency has been chosen.