In life cycle assessments it is a challenge to allocate resource use and environmental impact in processes with multiple outputs. This is especially the case when systems include agricultural products that in their production cannot be separated from each other. For emergy accounting, Bastianoni and Marchettini (2000) suggested how to calculate transformities and other indices for joint product...

Urban metabolism analysis has become a useful and effective tool to explore urban socio-economic processes. In this research, in order to explore the similarities and differences of metabolic characteristics and variation rules of different types of resource-dependent cities, we selected two cities—Taiyuan and Jincheng, the capital and a traditional resource-dependent city of Shanxi province, r...

From a global perspective, the ecological sustainability of building systems has always been hot research topic, especially in China, where annual amount new construction is nearly half world. The difficulty making complete and accurate assessment system. This study designed adopted LCA-Emergy-ANN framework to assess analyze an airport system for sustainability. results demonstrate that materia...

Renewable natural resources, such as solar radiation, rainfall, wind, and geothermal heat, together with ecosystem services, provide the elementary supports for the sustainable development of human society. To improve regional sustainability, we studied the spatial distributions and quantities of renewable natural resources and net primary productivity (NPP) in Hokkaido, which is the second lar...

The emergy concept, integrated with a multi-objective linear programming method, was used to model the agricultural structure of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region under the consideration of the need to develop a low-carbon economy. The emergy indices before and after the structural optimization were evaluated. In the reconstructed model, the proportions of agriculture, forestry and artificial gr...

The phrase ‘emergy baseline’ refers to the total yearly environmental support to the geobiosphere in terms of the emergy concept, and should include all three fundamental sources of exergy (i.e. sunlight, tidal exergy and deep earth heat). Ever since its introduction, the emergy baseline has undergone a continuous revision process, which, however, has so far focussed on the underlying equations...

Three different Danish pig production systems were evaluated using emergy assessment aiming at comparing their efficiency in transforming natural and societal resources into pigs sold. The systems differed in their production strategy by selling different groups of pigs either piglets, weaners, finishers or sows, gilts & boars. Both organic and conventional production was considered. We compare...

The intrinsic value of soil to national, regional and local agroecological and economic productivity in sub-Saharan Africa is not adequately manifest in financial planning and decision making, challenging long-term sustainability as that resource degrades. While efforts to internalize the external costs of soil erosion in monetary units are available in the literature, we offer an alternative a...

Improving resource efficiency and reducing waste discharge are the inevitable trends of development sustainable machining system. Therefore, a data-driven sustainability evaluation method system is proposed. The input (energy, materials, equipment, R&D, services) output (wastes products) data collected. These dimensional processed by emergy. emergy flow calculation model process established for...