Environmental impact assessment in an uncertain environment

'Green' manufacturing has become an important issue in industry, driven by regulations governing manufacturing emissions, growing worldwide environmental certification requirements (ISO 14000) and an emerging consumer preference for ecolabel products. Establishing a quantitative and effective assessment model to assess the environmental impact of manufacturing processes for a product has become important. This paper focuses on analysing the uncertainty of weighting factors in an environmental impact assessment and applying fuzzy set theory to determine the vague or fuzzy weighting factors of the various environmental impact categories. A case study demonstrates that the fuzzy set-based model can effectively account for the vagueness and uncertainty of information being used for environmental impact assessments. The proposed fuzzy model is useful, not only for evaluating the environmental impact of a manufacturing process, but also for selecting processes when environmental impact is one of the factors to be considered.

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