Industrial pollutant treatment efficiency considering environmental factors: A 3-stage parallel DEA model

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to improve the accuracy of evaluation efficiency by constructing parallel structures considering the main components of industrial pollutants, and then to consider some external influence factors to eliminate random errors.

Design/methodology/approach

In this paper, data transformation has been used to deal with undesirable output, and a model with a parallel structure based on the three-stage data envelopment analysis model to calculate the efficiency scores of different division in pollution treatment has been composed.

Findings

The analysis shows that the external environmental factors and random factors of the economy and society greatly affect the efficiency of industrial pollutant treatment; moreover, there is an imbalance between regions in China in the treatment of industrial pollutants.

Originality/value

Optimal improvement requires each province to take targeted measures to improve its efficiency of pollutant treatment measures, which are tailored to specific situations and determined by efficiency analysis in this paper.

Citation

Wu, J., Wang, C. and Zhou, Z. (2019), "Industrial pollutant treatment efficiency considering environmental factors: A 3-stage parallel DEA model", Journal of Modelling in Management, Vol. 14 No. 3, pp. 773-791. https://doi.org/10.1108/JM2-01-2019-0005