Evaluation of Cleaner Production for Gold Mines Employing a Hybrid Multi-Criteria Decision Making Approach

Weizhang Liang, Suizhi Luo and Guoyan Zhao
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Weizhang Liang: School of Resources and Safety Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China
Suizhi Luo: School of Systems Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China
Guoyan Zhao: School of Resources and Safety Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-20

Abstract: Implementing cleaner production (CP) is effective to resolve the contradiction between economic growth and environmental crisis. To avoid destroying the ecological environment in the exploitation process of mineral resources, CP has been developed in many gold mines to achieve the goal of sustainable development. Thus, this paper aims to propose a favorable approach to assess CP for gold mines. First, according to the specific characteristics of gold mines, an evaluation criteria system of CP is established. Meanwhile, considering the diversity of evaluation information, crisp numbers and probabilistic linguistic term sets (PLTSs) are adopted to indicate the quantitative and qualitative information, respectively. Subsequently, a modified experts grading method based on PLTSs is proposed to calculate the sub-criteria weights’ values. Following this, an extended Tomada de Decisão Interativa Multicritério (TODIM) method with hybrid evaluation values is presented to obtain the ranking order. Finally, the hybrid multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) approach is applied to a case of assessing CP for gold mines to demonstrate its feasibility. Furthermore, the robustness and advantages of this approach are justified by sensitivity and comparison analyses. The results show that the proposed approach is feasible to solve such kinds of evaluation problems with hybrid decision making information and can provide some managerial suggestions for government and enterprises.

Keywords: cleaner production (CP); extended Tomada de Decisão Interativa Multicritério (TODIM); probabilistic linguistic term sets (PLTSs); hybrid multi-criteria decision making (MCDM); gold mines (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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