A Fuzzy MCDM Approach to Evaluate Green Suppliers

Nowadays the effect of industrial production on the environment brought out the importance of the green concept in supply chains. Particularly for supplier firms, greening is essential in a supply chain because with growing worldwide awareness of environmental protection, green production has become an important theme for almost every manufacturer. While literature related to supplier evaluation is plentiful, the works on green supplier evaluation are rather limited. Therefore, a green supplier evaluation model is proposed in this study. Due to its multi criteria nature, the green supplier evaluation process requires an appropriate multi criteria analysis and solution approach. Selecting a proper method involves an insight analysis among available multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques. Among numerous methods of MCDM, this paper presents a decision framework based on group decision making (GDM) and fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) for evaluating and selecting green suppliers. The applicability of the proposed approach is verified through a case study.