Abstract
Urban sustainability is a critical target under the sustainable development goals (SDGs), especially considering the response of cities to most of the resource and carbon footprints of human beings. The circular economy (CE) strategy offers an innovative and important pathway for forwarding sustainable urban development in terms of resource saving and waste mitigation. A particularly important measure of the circular economy is the urban industrial symbiosis, which, as an imitation of the ecological system, is viewed as an effective way to achieve the sustainable and low-carbon transformation of industries and downtown areas. However, evidence of its comprehensive environmental benefit is less reported. With this circumstance, this paper aims at identifying the environmental benefits of urban industrial symbiosis, with a focus on urban carbon footprints (CFP). With this basis, we shall also discuss the promotion of urban industrial symbiosis as a critical component in support of the carbon neutrality strategy. A hybrid approach integrating a process-based inventory analysis and an input–output analysis (IOA) is developed to analyze urban CFPs. Results imply that considerable savings in resources and the reduction of CFPs could be achieved via the coal-aluminum-electricity-steel industrial symbiosis. In detail, the eight designed synergies, with the aluminum-electricity-steel plants as the hubs, could reduce CO2 by 1.09 Mt per year, which accounted for 3.63% of the total CFPs in the city in a business-as-usual (BAU) scenario in 2012. This could partly offset the increase of CO2 emissions due to the economy’s expansion and realize a second mitigation effect apart from the efficiency change in technologies. A crucial understanding of the function of industrial symbiosis in accelerating the sustainable transformation of cities could then be reached. Finally, further implications on policy when tackling the gaps in regional eco-industrial development are proposed and discussed.
Highlights
To tackle the climate change, a number of countries have announced a national carbon neutrality strategy [1,2,3]
This paper develops a hybrid approach that integrates a process-based inventory analysis and an input–output analysis (IOA) for the quantification of urban carbon footprints (CFP) in order to overcome the shortcomings of the traditional IPCC approach, life cycle analysis, and IOA
The CFP analytical approach can be divided into three types: (a) IPCC method (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emission inventory and factors), which is a bottom-up approach to account for the CFPs according to the fuel sources consumed on site but usually ignores the indirect emissions within the total life cycles [33,34]; (b) Life-cycle analysis (LCA) based on process analysis can quantify direct and indirect emissions, but mainly focuses on the CFP of microscopic entities such as products [35], consumers [36], and enterprises [37]; (c) Compared with the LCA method, the IOA method can use the input–output table (IOT) that contains aggregated information on sectors to measure the emissions of macroscopic bodies such as countries, regions, and cities [25,31]
Summary
To tackle the climate change, a number of countries have announced a national carbon neutrality strategy [1,2,3]. From the perspective of carbon mitigation, the potential could come from various sources, including technology innovation, efficiency measures as well as systematic innovation [4,5,6]. Among these countermeasures, how to explore the carbon mitigation potential from the perspective of industrial and urban systems is critical [7]. 5. Geographical information of of Guiyang city ininChina. Similar to most Chinese cities, Guiyang has experienced rapid economic growth and Similar to most. Guiyang has growth and Guiyang hasexperienced experienced rapideconomic economic growth a significant increase in resource consumption
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