Abstract
With the deepening of industrialization and urbanization in China, air pollution has become the most serious environmental issue due to huge energy consumption, which threatens the health of residents and the sustainable development of the country. Increasing attention has been paid to the efficiency evaluation of industrial system due to its fast development and severe air pollution emissions, but the efficiency evaluation on China’s industrial waste gas still has scope for improvement. This paper proposes a global non-radial Network Data Envelopment Analysis (NDEA) model from the perspective of pollution prevention (PP) and end-of-pipe treatment (ET), to explore the potential reduction of generation and emission of air pollutants in China’s industrial system. Given the differences of different air pollution treatment capacities, the ET stage is further subdivided into three parallel sub-stages, corresponding to SO2, NOX, and soot and dust (SD), respectively. Then, grey relation analysis (GRA) is adopted to figure out the key factor affecting the unified efficiency. The main findings are summarized as follows: firstly, the unified efficiency of China’s industrial waste gas underperformed nationwide, and most provinces had the potential to reduce the generation and emission of industrial waste gas. Secondly, the PP efficiency outperformed the ET efficiency in many provinces and the efficiency gap between two stages increasingly narrowed except in 2014. Thirdly, the unified efficiency in the eastern area performed well, while the area disparities increased significantly after 2012. Fourthly, significant differences were found in three ET efficiencies and the ET efficiency of NOX was higher than that of SO2 and SD in the sample period. Finally, the results of GRA indicated that different air pollutants had distinct influence on the improvement of the unified efficiency in three areas. To promote the unified efficiency of industrial waste gas, some pertinent policy suggestions are put forward from the perspectives of sub-stages, air pollutants and areas.
Highlights
In the past decades, China’s economy has achieved remarkable achievements
To maximize the effect of limited resources, grey relation analysis (GRA) is used to figure out the key factor affecting the unified efficiency four
As the important ways to reduce environmental pressure and achieve the goal of energy conservation and emission reduction, pollution prevention and end-of-pipe treatment are common in China current industrial system
Summary
China’s economy has achieved remarkable achievements. Its gross domestic product (GDP) exceeds 90 trillion RMB in 2018 [1], which is 244.8 times compared with that of. It is evident that both pollution prevention and end-of-pipe treatment are common in the current China’s industrial production, but there is no comprehensive research that considers them from the efficiency aspect. Air quality evaluation based on DEA has attracted much attention of scholars, such as [3,4,10,11] As mentioned, both the significant differences of different air pollutants and the different pollution treatment methods (PP and ET) of industrial pollutants in China have often been ignored. This paper proposes a network DEA model from the perspective of PP and ET On this basis, the end-of-pipe treatment is further divided into three parallel sub-stages, corresponding to SO2 , NOX and SD, respectively, to evaluate the corresponding efficiency of different air pollutants.
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