Emergy Analysis of an Industrial Park: The Case of Dalian, China
Yong Geng, Pan Zhang, Sergio Ulgiati, S. and Joseph Sarkis
Science of the Total Environment,
Vol. 408, No. 22, pp. 5273-5283, 2010.
With the rapid development of eco-industrial park projects in China, evaluating their overall
eco-efficiency is becoming an important need and a big challenge academically.
Developing ecologically conscious industrial park
management requires analysis of both industrial and ecological systems.
Traditional evaluation methods (neoclassical economics) and embodied energy and
exergy analyses) hardly meet this requirement due to their minor focus on
environmental issues, considered secondary to the maximization of economic and
technical objectives. Such methods focus primarily on the environmental impact
of emissions (and their economic consequences) and ignore the contribution of
ecological products and services as well as the load placed on environmental
systems and related problems of carrying capacity of economic and industrial
development. This paper presents a new
method, based upon emergy analysis and synthesis (Odum, 1996; Brown and Ulgiati,
2004; Odum, Brown and Williams, 2000). Such a method links economic and ecological systems together and
highlights the internal relation among the different subsystems and components,
thus, providing insight into the environmental performance and
sustainability of an industrial park.
This paper depicts the methodology of emergy analysis at the industrial park
level and provides a series of emergy-based indices. A case study is
investigated and discussed in order to show the potentiality of the emergy
method. Results from DEDZ (Dalian Economic Development Zone) show us the potential
of
emergy synthesis method at
the industrial park level and provides an eco-centric view of ecological and
human activities, which can be used for evaluating and improving industrial
activities, within environmentally concerned policy making. It has advantages
over other methods as it can reveal the value that free environmental services
and resources as well as labor, services and information input offer to the
industrial park, especially when decisions need to be made concerning
sustainability.
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