Emergy evaluation for a low-carbon industrial park

Abstract

As the basic units of eco-city development, low-carbon industrial parks significantly contribute to national environmental protection and carbon emission mitigation. This paper established an embodied carbon accounting framework based on emergy to identify the input–output structure and embodied carbon emission flows of the industrial park. An emergy-based embodied carbon indicator system was also set up to evaluate the low-carbon system performance. The case study of a typical industrial park in Beijing shows that the embodied carbon emissions of the whole process are mainly concentrated on the outside inputs, waste management and water recycling, of which the outside inputs have lower embodied carbon emission intensities than those of the waste management and water recycling sectors. The embodied carbon emission intensity associated with the exploitation of local renewable resources is lower than that of non-renewable resources. The embodied carbon-related sustainability indicator (ESICO2) is large, implying that the case park can sustain a balance between embodied carbon emission level and environment supporting ability. Particularly, the embodied carbon emission intensity of waste management per unit emergy yield is low, indicating that the environmental remediation cost of the total production of case park is relatively small.