Because of the urgent need to protect the environment, it has become vital to deal with the dangers and particularities associated with the growth in hazardous industrial waste. Governments have begun to expand their investments in the environmental protection industry and have tightened enterprise environmental management requirements. The 13th Five-Year Plan period in China, in particular, increased the focus on the environmental supervision and enterprise environmental management. Because of the specific qualities of many types of hazardous waste, most enterprises do not have the ability to process hazardous waste and therefore must outsource the disposal to third-party contractors. However, choosing suitable hazardous waste disposal enterprises (HWDE) can be difficult. Therefore, to assist in the selection of appropriate hazardous waste disposal enterprises, this paper developed a comprehensive evaluation index system for hazardous waste disposal enterprises (EISHWDE). As multi-criteria decision-making problems involve qualitative evaluations that have semantic ambiguity, hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets (HFLTS) were introduced to increase the accuracy of the evaluation process, an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) used to determine the objective indicator weights, and PROMETHEE (Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluation) employed to determine the final order for the selected enterprises. This research developed a scientific evaluation model that industrial waste enterprises (IWE) and related organizations could use to objectively and systematically select suitable hazardous waste disposal enterprises. Then, the problems of uncertainty and fuzzy semantics in the evaluation process were solved, and the weight of each selection criteria and the ranking of alternative enterprises are given.
Keywords: PROMETHEE; hazardous waste; hazardous waste disposal enterprise evaluation index system; hazardous waste disposal enterprises; hesitant fuzzy linguistic glossary.