Making Emergy Analysis More Popular for Environmentally Conscious Design and Manufacturing - Challenges and Opportunities

As the need for changing the current non-sustainable industrial activities becomes increasingly obvious, engineers are being forced to consider more holistic techniques for design and assessment of industrial products and processes. As a result, techniques such as life cycle assessment (LCA) and material flow analysis (MFA) have been developed and are increasingly popular. Many of these techniques are similar to emergy analysis, but lack the thermodynamic basis and breadth of emergy analysis. Although the need for including the contribution of ecosystems is widely recognized, and even though emergy analysis is able to meet this need, emergy analysis has still found relatively limited use in environmentally conscious design and manufacturing (ECDM) and LCA. Researchers in the ECDM and LCA society who are aware of emergy analysis seem to have a mostly negative view of the approach due to misunderstanding and inadequate access to details. This paper discusses the reasons why emergy analysis is not popular for engineering use and LCA. Most of the criticisms of emergy are either common to all holistic approaches that account for ecosystems within their systems boundaries, or a result of misunderstandings derived from a lack of communication between various disciplines. By identifying the main points of criticisms of emergy, this work attempts to clarify many of the common misconceptions about emergy, inform the community of emergy practitioners about the aspects that need to be communicated better or improved, and suggest solutions. Further research and interaction with other disciplines, particularly engineering thermodynamics, is essential to bring emergy analysis into the mainstream of ECDM and LCA.