Emergy Analysis of Protected Grape Production System in China
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This paper evaluated the energy and emergy characters and indicators of the protected grape production system in the five major producing areas in China based on the emergy analysis. The research results indicate that the total emergy input in the Northwest region is the largest. The protected cultivation in all the five regions is heavily dependent on the purchased resource and nonrenewable resource emergy. The Southwest region is found to have the lowest environmental pressure and the highest sustainability.Keywords:
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Abstract Sustainability as an environmental policy objective has been embraced by a growing number of governments and organizations. Yet the ability to measure environmental sustainability—and to give concrete meaning to the term (Esty, 2001)—has not kept pace with the spread of this goal. This chapter reports on efforts to create one of the first such measures: the Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI). The ESI seeks to measure overall progress toward, and capacity to achieve, environmental sustainability for 122 countries.
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The article presents a brief description and criticism of the current state of the emergy analysis for wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) and a new index for the assessment of environmental facilities. As well as in the analysis of economic systems, the assessment of systems and plants for the protection of the environment, provided in the literature, is based on the calculation of basic emergy indices (the emergy yield ratio (EYR) isthe ratio of the sum of renewable kinds of emergy, non-renewable ones and purchased or free resources to the emergy of purchased resources; the environmental loading ratio (ELR) is defined as the ratio of the sum of nonrenewable and imported (purchased) emergy to renewable emergy; the emergy sustainability index (ESI) equal to the ratio of economy (EYR) to depletion (ELR) determines the degree of viability of the facility), which does not take into consideration a fundamental difference of production facilities and facilities designed to protect the environment from pollution. The environmental performance of the facilities, calculated as the ratio of the difference between the emergy estimates of preventable damage and caused damage to the preventable damage, must serve as the main emergy index for the assessment of treatment facilities.
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Due to excessive resource consumption and pressing environmental issues of the sewage treatment industry, there is extensive attention in China. Given the unique craft production process in the sewage treatment system, a series of integral emergy indicators have been used to evaluate the environmental sustainability based on infrastructure construction and operation stage emergy analysis. Taking a new typical sewage treatment plant as an example, this paper performed a case study. The results illustrate that (1) the infrastructure construction process emergy (approximate 92.6%) is more critical than sewage treatment process emergy; (2) nonrenewable resource is the primary factor for the emergy analysis, followed by energy (23.5%) and purchased supply (7%); (3) cement, steel, and gravel have dominant impacts on the nonrenewable resource emergy; (4) the emergy sustainability index is 0.001101, which displays weak environmental sustainability; (5) the unit emergy value (UEV) of the new sewage treatment plant is 3.40 × 1012 sej/m3; (6) sensitivity analysis results of the hypothesis demonstrate that nonrenewable resources have significant fluctuations (6.903%) while, for the indicators, emergy sustainability index (ESI) (4.8072%) has the most significant impact; and (7) wastewater is a major contributor. In light of comprehensive discussions, two positive measures are proposed in order to ameliorate the environmental sustainability.
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Emergy analysis (emergy synthesis) is one of the methods in the sustainability assessment toolbox. In the way it is using stocks and flows of energy and matter it is similar to Life Cycle Assessmen ...
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Based on the method of emergy analysis, this study analyzed the emergy structure of the eco-economic system in Qingdao City, and then comprehensively evaluated the ecological health, investment and yield, environmental loading capacity, and sustainable development levels of the system from 2009 to 2013. The results showed that during this period, the total use of emergy increased from 3.7×1023sej to 5.62×1023sej; the emergy self-support ratio dropped from 50.51% to 38.67%; the emergy loading ratio increased from 12.25% to 18.19%; and the emergy sustainable index dropped from 0.16 to 0.09. In conclusion, Qingdao City belongs to a developed urban with a sustainable development tendency. However, the overcrowding and overuse of nonrenewable and external resources have become a regional eco-environmental problem. The competition of the sustainability of Qingdao City needs to be improved in a long term.
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