A Stratified Fuzzy Decision-Making Approach for Sustainable Circular Supplier Selection

Circular economy has attracted great attention as it meets environmental and social requirements. Selecting appropriate suppliers considering circular, and sustainability aspects for all industries is of great significance. However, addressing sustainable circular supplier selection (SCSS) problems is a difficult task due to the uncertainty in real-life cases in terms of possible future events and experts’ judgments. This article aims to address the SCSS problem considering the impacts of possible future events via a multiple-criteria decision-making framework. For this purpose, stratification theory is utilized to develop and practice a novel framework called stratified fuzzy full consistency method to identify the optimal weight coefficients of criteria considering the possible impacts of future events. Later, a novel extension of mixed aggregation by comprehensive normalization technique under fuzzy environment is developed to prioritize suppliers with respect to sustainability and circular economy criteria. To prove the practicability of the developed methodology, outcomes of a real case study related to a textile company in Turkey are presented. Furthermore, sensitivity analyses and a comparative analysis are conducted to illustrate the proposed model's performance under different conditions. According to the results, information disclosure, interests and rights of employees, and child labor are identified as top three criteria with values of 0.1112, 0.1102, and 0.1110, respectively.