Medical waste disposal site selection under uncertainty: An interval-valued neutrosophic CRITIC-MARCOS decision support framework

With the ongoing expansion of healthcare services, the amount of medical waste (MW) has been rising steadily, placing increasing pressure on environmental systems and public health. Identifying an appropriate disposal site is challenging because it requires balancing multiple, often conflicting criteria under considerable evaluation uncertainty. This paper develops a hybrid decision-making framework in an interval-valued neutrosophic (IVN) environment by integrating criteria importance through intercriteria correlation (CRITIC) with measurement of alternatives and ranking according to compromise solution (MARCOS). Interval-valued neutrosophic sets represent ambiguity, indeterminacy, and hesitation in expert judgments, while CRITIC derives data-driven criterion weights from aggregated expert evaluations by considering post-deneutrosophication dispersion and inter-criterion conflict. The extended MARCOS method prioritizes alternatives using a utility function that incorporates the ideal and anti-ideal solutions. A secondary-data methodological illustration assesses four candidate locations using nineteen social, economic, environmental, infrastructural, and geological criteria. Comparisons with IVN-TOPSIS, IVN-MAIRCA, IVN-EDAS, and IVN-VIKOR show that all five frameworks identify the same first-ranked site, whereas the ordering of the remaining alternatives is method-sensitive. These comparisons are interpreted at the integrated-framework level because the benchmark methods retain their own weighting and ranking mechanisms.