Abstract
The sustainable development of agriculture is facing problems such as high resource consumption and serious environmental pollution. The development of the circular economy model integrating planting and breeding (CEMIPB) has become an effective way to realize the sustainable development of agriculture. Due to the great difference of natural resource attributes in different regions of China, CEMIPB shows diverse characteristics on the whole. Based on this, this paper constructs a coupling model based on emergy analysis (EMA) and life cycle assessment (LCA) called EM-LCA model and conducts an empirical analysis using a typical CEMIPB in Fujian Province, China, as a case. By comparing the results of the EM-LCA and EMA models, the former effectively compensates for the deficiencies of the latter in terms of economic and environmental impact assessment, and the evaluation results can better reflect the actual situation of the system. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis is introduced to identify key processes and substances. Based on the reduce-reuse-recycle (3R) principle, several optimization suggestions, such as reducing the input of corn and veterinary drugs, are put forward. The construction of the aforementioned methodology system can provide a new perspective for research in similar fields and provide a scientific basis for local government decision making.
Highlights
As the world’s population boomed, agricultural production expanded rapidly
Referring to the research results of Odum and Brown (2000), 15.83×1024 sej/yr is used as the emergy baseline to determine the unit emergy value (UEV) values of each substance under different baselines
The main contribution of this paper is to construct a methodology system for the evaluation and optimization of the circular economy model integrating planting and breeding (CEMIPB) based on the EM-life cycle assessment (LCA) model and the “3R” principle
Summary
As the world’s population boomed, agricultural production expanded rapidly. Such rapid development has caused problems such as resource depletion and environmental degradation (Wesseh and Lin 2017; Iacovidou et al 2020). As a major agricultural country, China is facing increasingly prominent resource constraints and environmental problems (Qian et al 2018; Wang et al 2018). China is a large country that uses fertilizers and pesticides. The high use and low efficiency of chemical fertilizers and pesticides have resulted in increased input costs and resource consumption. The huge discharge of agricultural wastes such as straw and livestock manure has caused environmental pollution and ecological damage (Li et al 2016)
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