Hazardous waste can cause severe environmental pollution if not disposed of properly, which in turn can seriously affect the sustainable development of the entire ecology and will inevitably bring disaster to companies. However, because of limited available disposal capacity, it is often difficult to safely dispose of hazardous waste, meaning that it must be kept as passive inventory. For the passive inventory of hazardous waste, risk evaluation of safe operation of the inventory is crucial and urgently needs to be resolved. Based on this, this paper focuses on the risk management of hazardous waste inventory of waste-producing companies and proposes a risk evaluation system for safely dealing with hazardous waste inventory, which expands the scope of inventory safety management and provides guidance to companies on developing appropriate measures to ensure hazardous waste inventory safety. First, the risk evaluation index system for hazardous waste inventory is constructed from equipment, management level, nature of hazardous waste and operational aspects. Then, the best worst method (BWM) is employed to calculate the criteria weights and the technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) is employed to rank the alternatives. Finally, risk evaluation on four waste-producing companies was conducted using the developed method. The results show that Case Company 4 has the greatest risk of hazardous waste inventory, which should be reduced by improving storage method and the amount of hazardous waste. It was found that the proposed evaluation system was effective for hazardous waste inventory safety risk assessments and that the designed index system could assist companies improve their hazardous waste inventory management.
Keywords: BWM; TOPSIS; hazardous waste; inventory management; risk evaluation; sustainable development.