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 techniq...

In the current century, agriculture sustainability and the reduction of environmental pressure are two main objectives of the management of agro-ecosystems that is challenged by energy inefficiency. In this respect, the present study assessed one of the most important planting systems in Sistan region by emergy analysis approach. It analyzed all inputs of greenhouse cucumber production system i...

Self-organization is a process where order of a whole system arises out of local interactions between small components of a system. Emergy, defined as the amount of (solar) energy used to make a product or a service, is becoming an important ecological indicator. To explain observed self-organization of systems by emergy the Maximum Empower Principle (MEP) was proposed initially without a mathe...

Integrated analysis on socio-economic metabolism could provide a basis for understanding and optimizing regional sustainability. The paper conducted socio-economic metabolism analysis by means of the emergy accounting method coupled with data envelopment analysis and decomposition analysis techniques to assess the sustainability of Qingyang city and its eight sub-region system, as well as to id...

Power and heat are the primary energies for the industry and communities. Combined heat and power (CHP) is a process of heat and power cogeneration, which is designed to meet the needs of both users. In previous studies of emergy analysis on CHP, the transformity was simply calculated by dividing the total emergy input by the amount of production. The result always showed that transformity of e...

We evaluated the education system of the United States from 1870 to 2011 using emergy methods. The system was partitioned into three subsystems (elementary, secondary and college/university education) and the emergy inputs required to support each subsystem were determined for every year over the period of analysis. We calculated the emergy required to produce an individual with a given number ...

This emergy-based urban economic account provided a historical portrait of the urban economy and its structures to understand the overload of the biosphere`s assimilative capacity. The basic situation of the urban economy, involving the indigenous resources base, emergy consumption patterns, emergy exports and imports, were investigated, accounted and discussed. Using a series of ratios and ind...

As the natural resources are getting exhausted, the concept of sustainable development of regions has received increasing attention, especially for resource-dependent cities. In this paper, an innovative method based on emergy analysis and the Human Impact Population Affluence Technology (IPAT) model is developed to analyze the quantitative relationship of economic growth, energy consumption an...

Governments around the world evaluate economic performance using macroeconomic indicators, such as GDP. In this study emergy accounting was used to assess the economy of Argentina during the 20 century. Emergy evaluations of the Argentine economy for five time periods (1900-1929, 1930-1943, 1944-1975, 1976-1989, and 1990-1995) were conducted. Results were compared with evaluations of other coun...

Emergy Algebra rules may not allow for appropriate accounting of recycled material emergy. The loss of emergy is not permitted using Emergy Algebra rules, but is necessary to address recycling material. It has been proposed to use Dynamic Emergy Accounting so that emergy loss can be factored in when allocating emergy to material recycle pathways. However, systems are often evaluated at steady-s...