Framework for calculating ecological footprint of process industries in local hectares using emergy and LCA approach
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Framework for calculating ecological footprint of process industries in local hectares using emergy and LCA approach Laxmi A. Zadgaonkar1 · Sachin A. Mandavgane1 Received: 14 April 2020 / Accepted: 15 October 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Environmental impact assessment has gained equal importance with economics in process industries. Various methodologies are extensively used for impact assessment namely life cycle assessment (LCA), emergy analysis and ecological footprint analysis. The LEEF methodology calculates ecological footprint using emergy analysis and LCA to quantify impact in terms of local hectares of land. This work tries to merge the strength of all the three methodologies. Ecological footprint due for input provisioning is calculated using regional emergy density (RED), and ecological footprint due to emissions/ waste assimilation is calculated using the LCA results. The LEEF framework is named as LCA-emergy-ecological footprint (LEEF) framework. LEEF is demonstrated using the case study of formaldehyde manufacturing process. The major advantages of using LEEF are (1) it accounts for emissions aggregated based on its impact on environment using LCA like acidifying emissions, other than just carbon dioxide which may cause serious harm to environment, (2) it incorporates all flows including renewable energy flows from ecosystem, (3) assigns quality to each input flow and evaluates sustainability from donor-side perspective and (4) calculates ecological footprint in local hectares thereby accounting for the impact on regional ecosystem rather than global ecosystem, making assessment more realistic. Graphic abstract
Keywords Ecological footprint · Emergy · Life cycle assessment · Regional emergy density · Chemical process industry
Introduction Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10098-020-01970-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Sachin A. Mandavgane [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
Currently, all nations are striving for promoting its economic growth. The economic growth of a nation is perceived as the function of industrialization and urbanization. The rapid increase in industrialization directly relates to natural resources demand like coal, fossil fuel, water and emissions such as carbon dioxide and methane. For
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1% increase in total industrial output, there is increase of 24% in the level of emissions per capita (Cherniwchan 2010). This has led to unprecedented planetary changes that have placed a challenge before us to establish a synergy between economy and ecology. The purpose of establishing the synergy is to evaluate the extent to which the activity is causing stress to environment by accounting resource consumption and impact due to emissions. This will help in guiding the decision makers during the stage of designing the process. Various tools
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