| Industry has made great contribution to China's economic development; however, industrial production also leads to serious resources and environment related problems. Industrial parks are the most important carrier of industrialization and they have become the important form during the course of industrial development. However, low resource efficiency, environmental problems and other issues have restrained their sustainable development. Therefore, it is very necessary to quantitatively evaluate the sustainability of industrial park so as to find out the related optimized measures.Traditional evaluation methods based on current, energy, exergy and material flow have certain limitations due to their focus on economic and technical objectives but ignoring the contribution of ecological products and services. Emergy analysis (EA) can solve this problem through considering ecological system's contribution to economic activities; meanwhile, this method bases the evaluation results on one common measure unit-emergy, and then it can provide a united conclusion for policy-making. So it can act as a beneficial supplement to the traditional evaluation methods. However, classic EA ignores the impact of emissions when evaluating the industrial process. Therefore, this method needs to be improved to quantify the impact of emissions, and then the related indicators should be also adjusted.This paper applied emergy theory and method to evaluate the sustainability of industrial parks. By considering emissions'impacts, this paper integrated dilution method, disability adjusted life years (DALY) method, potentially disappeared fraction (PDF) method into classic emergy analysis. Furthermore, an improved emergy indicator system, characterizing the industrial production process, was set up. Meanwhile, the contribution of each member industry to the emergy indicators of the entire system was also quantified through distribution of emergy indices method. As a case, an industrial park, in Sichuan province in China, was investigated by using the proposed methods and indicator system. And the research results are given as follows.(1) In the total emergy put, it is found that the free renewable inputs, free nonrenewable inputs, the purchased renewable inputs and purchased nonrenewable inputs contribute 4.66%,7.91%,12.27% and 75.12% to the total emergy input, respectively. Therein, fossil fuels, including coal, coke, fuel oil and diesel, contributed 15.45% to the total emergy input. As for the sub-systems of the industrial park, the purchased emergy, especially the purchased nonrenewable resource make the largest contribution to total emergy input.(2) Ecological services and emergy loss contributed shares of 86.93% and 13.07% to the total emission impacts, respectively. Therein,99.95% of ecological services came from water environment service needed to dilute water pollutants (especially diluting oil); meanwhile,94.54% of emergy loss came from impacts of PM2.5 emissions on human health.(3) The results from the proposed indicator system show that this industrial park has a relatively lower wastes recycling/reuse degree (RRBR=3.62%), and consumes more emergy when producing the same economic output compared to other similar industrial parks (UEVE=2.83E13sej/us$). And this industrial park has also a high environmental pressure (IELR=7.92). And all these issues lead to its unsustainability in the long term (IEIS=0.165).(4) According to the classic emergy based indicators, this industrial park has relatively high economic competition ability (EYR=1.20), relatively low environmental press (ELR=6.95), and relatively strong sustainability (ESI=0.173) compared to other industrial parks in China. However, its low economic efficiency and low wastes recycling/reuse degree still seriously challenge its sustainability with the exhaustion of local mineral resources in the future. Moreover, emissions'impact further raises its environmental load (4.92%) and reduces its sustainability level (4.69%) accordingly.(5) The chemical industry system and the silica industry system make the largest effect on the comprehensive performance of the industrial park according to distribution of emergy indices analysisFinally, this paper presents the corresponding suggestions for improving the comprehensive performance of this industrial park, including (1) implementation of cleaner production, (2) further raising the eco-industry level, (3) adjustment of energy structure, and (4) improving pollution control strategy. |
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