Journal
CLEAN TECHNOLOGIES AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
Volume 22, Issue 10, Pages 2207-2221Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s10098-020-01970-4
Keywords
Ecological footprint; Emergy; Life cycle assessment; Regional emergy density; Chemical process industry
Ask authors/readers for more resources
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] .
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available