Evaluating and managing interactive barriers for sustainable e-waste management in China

Abstract

E-waste, also known as waste electrical and electronic equipment, has become one of the fastest growing waste streams worldwide. As the world’s largest e-waste processing country, China’s e-waste management practice is facing multiple barriers to meet the requirement of sustainability from the economic, environmental and social perspectives. With an empirical study on the e-waste management practice of a major province in Western China, this paper develops an integrated planning approach for evaluating and managing the barriers which have mutual influence on their impact on the e-waste management practice. In consideration of interactive relationships of the barriers, a barrier assessment process is developed to assess the direct and indirect impacts of the barriers on the sustainable e-waste management practice in terms of economic, environmental and social sustainability criteria. A strategic planning process is proposed to categorise the barriers into four planning zones based on their overall impact and mitigation level. This paper contributes to e-waste management research by providing a structured approach for managing interactive barriers to achieve sustainable e-waste management. The proposed approach represents a methodological contribution to multicriteria evaluation research involving sustainability criteria and interactive alternatives.

Keywords:

• Interactive barriers
• causal analysis
• multicriteria decision making
• optimal criteria weighting
• strategic planning
• E-waste management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the [National Natural Science Foundation of China] under Grant [numbers 71601155 and 71671139]; the [Natural Science Basic Research Plan in Shaanxi Province of China] under Grant [number 2017JQ7001]; the [National Social Science Fund of China] under Grant [number 15BGL073]; and the [Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities] under Grant [number 3102017zy060]. We are grateful to the Editor and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.