Research on Evaluation Index System and Comprehensive Evaluation of Typical Eco-Industrial Parks

Abstract

The eco-industrial park (EIP), as a new industrial park combining the concept of circular economy and industrial ecology principles of construction, has not only become an effective way to achieve sustainable development, improving energy efficiency and the ecological environment quality in many countries, but has also become an important carrier of implementing science-based, adjusting the industrial structure, accelerating the transformation, and upgrading and constructing ecological civilization in China. China began construction of eco-industrial demonstration park pilots in 1999, and subsequently has actively carried out the practice of building eco-industrial parks nationwide. Although the EIPs have made great progress in terms of planning and construction, and achieved some success in improving energy efficiency, reducing environmental pollution, and improving environmental quality, there are many problems in the development process that restrict the stable operation and coordinated development and continuous improvement of the park, such as weak ecological relevance between enterprises, low resources and energy output rate, imperfect organizational structure, unclear construction goals, and insufficient technical innovation. The causes of these problems are mainly due to the government agencies and park management department not paying enough attention to the coordinated development degree of EIPs, lacking a practicable index system and assessment method for assessing the degree of sustainable development and comprehensive development level, which result in their being unable to fully grasp the operational state of the park and also unable to formulate a highly appropriate development strategy. Therefore this chapter, based on the systematic study of the development of EIPs both domestic and abroad, is focused on the theory and methods of constructing the index system of EIPs, establishing the degree of coordination and comprehensive development level index system, and evaluation methods of sector-integrated eco-industrial parks (SIEIPs). Specific research includes the following aspects: (1) reviewing the status of domestic and foreign research and development of EIPs, and at the same time, overviewing several relevant theories and methods of construction of an EIP evaluation index system, including: eco-efficiency, flow analysis, and index systems; (2) drawing on the ideas of the analytic hierarchy process and taking the coordinated development degree and the comprehensive development level as the overall evaluation goal of SIEIPs, from economic development, resource utilization, environmental protection, ecological civilization, park management, and social progress, six subsystems proceeding to consider the current situation, construction effect, stability of development, sustainability and coordination of SIEIP development, and then using frequency statistics and expert consulting methods to select several evaluation indexes initially, further superimposed on the primary indicators analyzed, to screen and ultimately fix the evaluation index system of SIEIPs; (3) applying a multilevel extension comprehensive evaluation method to build a model of coordinated development degree and integrated development level of the SIEIPs, and using this model to evaluate a typical eco-industrial park. The results show that typical EIPs will have to make more effort regarding the stable and sustainable development of circular economy status. In addition, the evaluation results are factor analyzed, proposing strategies and measures for improvement.