Sustainability ranking of the UK major ports: Methodology and case study

•The sustainable port performance is evaluated in order to rank ports by decision makers.•We consider the environmental and economical aspects of sustainability.•Multi criteria decision making is utilized to evaluate the importance of different criteria and sub-criteria.•We investigate sustainability criteria in the United Kingdom port systems as a case study. Maritime supply chain sustainability has not been widely studied to date. This paper investigates the sustainability performance of five major UK ports. The UK port system is one of the largest and busiest port systems both in Europe and worldwide. The scope of sustainability narrows down to economical and environmental dimensions. A questionnaire is developed to collect data from port managers and logistics experts. The AHP method is utilized to rank the ports using the collected data. Sensitivity analysis is conducted on the obtained data to verify the consistency among data and outcomes.