An analysis of consumer opinions on waste medicine management utilizing fermatean fuzzy cognitive mapping

Abstract

The management of post-consumer medicine waste has become increasingly important due to the high levels of consumer purchasing and stockpiling of drugs brought on by the pandemic. Environmental, social, and financial sustainability are directly influenced by the specifics of how pharmaceutical waste should be disposed of or recycled. Hence, this study provides a comprehensive approach that employs text mining with the inclusion of 894 participants for preliminary research to extract consumer-centric waste medicine awareness criteria, and proposes a Fermatean Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (F-FCM) approach to examine the relationships among the concepts to identify the most important ones, and compares F-FCM with the classical FCM to demonstrate the effectiveness of the improved approach. The findings of the example from Turkey reveal that waste medicine management applications prioritize (1) establishing a trusted system for collecting and recycling medicine, (2) ensuring the reliability of business models, and (3) increasing societal awareness. The F-FCM ranking differs slightly from the classical FCM ranking when uncertainty is introduced. The present study contributes to the literature by proposing a novel approach and utilizing text mining as a data-extracting tool. A practitioner can also understand the perspectives of real consumers, identify long-term plans, and comprehend the requirements of a service network with several stakeholders.