Performance assessment of circular economy for phosphorus chemical firms based on VIKOR-QUALIFLEX method

Confronting the dilemma of resource shortage and environmental pollution, the idea of circular economy (CE) has attracted widespread attentions. To address these problems, several industrial companies have incorporated the CE in their operation or design. In this sense, the phosphorus chemical firms (PCFs) are promoting CE to achieve sustainable development goals since phosphorus is a non-renewable resource and one of the nutrient elements essential for crop growth. Thus, this paper aims to find a suitable way to assess the performance of CE for PCFs. Firstly, the evaluation index system of CE is designed according to the characteristics of CE for PCFs. Then, a new framework based on the qualitative flexible (QUALIFLEX) and Vlsekriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) methods is established to pick out the best enterprise. The linguistic neutrosophic number (LNN) is advised to describe decision making information with linguistic true, hesitant and false membership degree. Moreover, an entropy-based approach is used to determine the index weights, and the VIKOR method is presented to determine the concordance index. After that, all possible permutations are itemized, and the ranking result is obtained according to the general concordance index values of each permutation: Finally, an example of assessing the performance of CE for PCFs in China is given to illustrate the proposed method, and its feasibility is demonstrated. The robustness and advantage of this approach are also indicated with sensitivity and comparison analysis. The results show that the proposed VIKOR-QUALIFLEX method is reliable and stable for assessing the performance of CE for PCFs, and provides references for the construction and management of CE for PCFs. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.