Identifying sustainable solid waste management barriers in practice using the fuzzy Delphi method

•The barriers are the cause of poor SSWM performance in practice due to limited resources.•This study applied the FDM to acquire reliable attributes in qualitative information.•The most important barriers are household hazardous waste, insufficient funds for SWM research etc. Solid waste management leads to resource loss and limited waste management approaches. Nevertheless, solid waste management must be studied in terms of sustainability by both academicians and practitioners. There are barriers to understanding and challenges to maintaining sustainable solid waste management practices. Hence, this study collects a set of attributes, including seven aspects and 146 barriers, from the existing literature. The barriers are the cause of poor sustainable solid waste management performance in practice due to limited resources. Hence, this study aims to identify the major barriers presented as qualitative information; however, the attributes need to be transformed into a comparable scale. This study applied the fuzzy Delphi method to acquire valid and reliable attributes through qualitative information. The results show 44 essential barriers to sustainable solid waste management. Four aspects are included: (1) technical difficulties; (2) information sharing and knowledge problems; (3) human resource limitations; and (4) financial and economic problems. The most important barriers are identified as household hazardous waste, insufficient funds for SWM research, local architecture, a lack of staff capability, and a lack of a standard process for data collection and analysis. The theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.