3R for food waste management: fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making for technology selection

Abstract Food waste management issues have caused wide concerns worldwide in recent years. This chapter focuses on the assessment and ranking for the food waste management technologies with the considerations of 3R principles. Five technologies, including anaerobic digestion (AD), ethanol fermentation, incineration, pyrolysis/gasification, and hydrothermal carbonization, are ranked by the fuzzy TOPSIS (technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution) method and fuzzy GRA (gray relational analysis) method considering seven criteria which belong to their environmental, economic, and social aspects. The ranking results of both methods indicate that hydrothermal carbonization has considerable priority over the other four technologies based on all the selected indicators. Incineration is the least preferred one due to its bad overall performance. Recommendations were accordingly proposed to promote sustainable food waste management in Hong Kong in the future.