Assessment of environmental performance criteria in textile industry using the Best-Worst Method

Abstract

The current consumption of clothing and textile causes great environmental concerns in the society, especially textile waste. With increasing environmental awareness, textile industries have begun to consider environmental issues in their production. This study evaluated and prioritized the important environmental performance criteria related to textile industry. In this paper, a recently developed multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method, namely Best-Worst Method (BWM) which can solve decision making problems based on limited pairwise comparisons, was used to evaluate the environmental performance criteria in textile industry in order to derive the weights of the criteria and priorities of the sub-criteria. This study used five environmental performance criteria and twenty sub-criteria selected from the literature and validated by experts. After that, the BWM calculated the importance of each criterion. The findings showed that raw material, chemical oxygen demand and fresh water are the most important criteria while fabric waste, methane and non-biodegradable material are the least crucial criteria. This research provided useful insights for stakeholders in textile industry so that they can benefit from the results to optimize their operations.