Framework for calculating ecological footprint of process industries in local hectares using emergy and LCA approach

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. [GRAPHICS] .