Cleaner Production Evaluation in Gold Mines Using Novel Distance Measure Method with Cubic Picture Fuzzy Numbers

Faced with the contradiction between economic growth and environmental pollution, to implement cleaner production has become a good choice for many mining companies in order to achieve sustainable development. This study aims to explore applicable decision-making methods to evaluate the cleaner production for gold mines. First, the CPFNs (cubic picture fuzzy numbers) are adopted to describe experts' assessment information under complicated fuzzy environment. Thereafter, the mean-squared deviation models are combined to obtain the comprehensive criteria weights. Meanwhile, a novel evaluation method, which integrates the ranking of CPFNs and distance measure, is proposed to judge the cleaner production level. Subsequently, according to the characteristics of gold mines, the evaluation criteria system of cleaner production is constructed. Finally, a case of evaluating the cleaner production performance for three gold mines is provided to explain the application of the proposed method. Besides this, a systematic comparison analysis with other existent methods is conducted to reveal the advantages of our method. Results indicate that the proposed method is suitable and effective for gold mines to evaluate their cleaner production performance and has important reference values for the cleaner production management and implementation.