Ranking Iranian provinces in terms of the environmental performance of industries with a developed decision-making approach

Nowadays, industrial environmental management with the aim of preserving the environment has become one of the crucial matters to industries. Rising global concerns about the negative effects of industrial activity have led to a variety of changes in governments' policies and strategies to improve environmental performance. Hence, it is very important to study the environmental performance of industries This study evaluates and ranks the Iranian provinces o in terms of environmental performance of industries, various dimensions. This research defines a multidimensional set of environmentally friendly manufacturing criteria by examining the various aspects of industrial activities impacts on the environment and also with the assistance of experts’ guidance for evaluating the industries at the provincial level. Then, we use a combined approach based on decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory technique and analytic network process (DANP) method to calculate the interactions between the research criteria and sub-criteria along with their influential weights. In the end, we utilize the additive ratio assessment (ARAS) technique to obtain relative utility coefficients (closeness coefficients) and ranking the provinces. Generally, this study concludes that industries in northwestern and southwestern provinces of Iran are more environmentally friendly than other provinces. In this evaluation, Bushehr, North Khorasan and Khuzestan provinces were ranked first to third with their relative utility coefficients of 0.488, 0.412 and 0.401, respectively.