IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/inecol/v15y2011i4p550-567.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Emergy as a Life Cycle Impact Assessment Indicator

Author

Listed:
  • Wesley W. Ingwersen

Abstract

Founded in thermodynamics and systems ecology, emergy evaluation is a method to associate a product with its dependencies on all upstream environmental and resource flows using a common unit of energy. Emergy is thus proposed as an indicator of aggregate resource use for life cycle assessment (LCA). An LCA of gold mining, based on an original life cycle inventory of a large gold mine in Peru, is used to demonstrate how emergy can be incorporated as an impact indicator into a process‐based LCA model. The results demonstrate the usefulness of emergy in the LCA context. The adaptation of emergy evaluation, traditionally performed outside of the LCA framework, requires changes to the conventional accounting rules and the incorporation of uncertainty estimations of the emergy conversion factors, or unit emergy values. At the same time, traditional LCA boundaries are extended to incorporate the environmental processes that provide for raw resources, including ores. The total environmental contribution to the product, doré, is dominated by mining and metallurgical processes and not the geological processes forming the gold ore. The measure of environmental contribution to 1 gram (g) of doré is 6.8E + 12 solar‐equivalent Joules (sej) and can be considered accurate within a factor of 2. These results are useful in assessing a process in light of available resources, which is essential to measuring long‐term sustainability. Comparisons are made between emergy and other measures of resource use, and recommendations are made for future incorporation of emergy into LCA that will result in greater consistency with existing life cycle inventory (LCI) databases and other LCA indicators.

Suggested Citation

  • Wesley W. Ingwersen, 2011. "Emergy as a Life Cycle Impact Assessment Indicator," Journal of Industrial Ecology, Yale University, vol. 15(4), pages 550-567, August.
  • Handle: RePEc:bla:inecol:v:15:y:2011:i:4:p:550-567
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1530-9290.2011.00333.x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1530-9290.2011.00333.x
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/j.1530-9290.2011.00333.x?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Rodrigo A. F. Alvarenga & Ittana De Oliveira Lins & José Adolfo de Almeida Neto, 2016. "Evaluation of Abiotic Resource LCIA Methods," Resources, MDPI, vol. 5(1), pages 1-21, February.
    2. Raugei, Marco & Rugani, Benedetto & Benetto, Enrico & Ingwersen, Wesley W., 2014. "Integrating emergy into LCA: Potential added value and lingering obstacles," Ecological Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 271(C), pages 4-9.
    3. Wesley Ingwersen & Heriberto Cabezas & Anne V. Weisbrod & Tarsha Eason & Bayou Demeke & Xin Ma & Troy R. Hawkins & Seung-Jin Lee & Jane C. Bare & Manuel Ceja, 2014. "Integrated Metrics for Improving the Life Cycle Approach to Assessing Product System Sustainability," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 6(3), pages 1-28, March.
    4. Iribarren, Diego & Vázquez-Rowe, Ian & Rugani, Benedetto & Benetto, Enrico, 2014. "On the feasibility of using emergy analysis as a source of benchmarking criteria through data envelopment analysis: A case study for wind energy," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 67(C), pages 527-537.
    5. Liu, Zhe & Adams, Michelle & Cote, Raymond P. & Geng, Yong & Chen, Qinghua & Liu, Weili & Sun, Lu & Yu, Xiaoman, 2017. "Comprehensive development of industrial symbiosis for the response of greenhouse gases emission mitigation: Challenges and opportunities in China," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 102(C), pages 88-95.
    6. Ernest Frimpong Asamoah & Lixiao Zhang & Sai Liang & Mingyue Pang & Shoujuan Tang, 2017. "Emergy Perspectives on the Environmental Performance and Sustainability of Small-Scale Gold Production Systems in Ghana," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 9(11), pages 1-17, November.
    7. Qingsong Wang & Hongkun Xiao & Qiao Ma & Xueliang Yuan & Jian Zuo & Jian Zhang & Shuguang Wang & Mansen Wang, 2020. "Review of Emergy Analysis and Life Cycle Assessment: Coupling Development Perspective," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(1), pages 1-13, January.
    8. Stephen G. Wiedemann & Quan V. Nguyen & Simon J. Clarke, 2022. "Using LCA and Circularity Indicators to Measure the Sustainability of Textiles—Examples of Renewable and Non-Renewable Fibres," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(24), pages 1-14, December.
    9. Gala, Alba Bala & Raugei, Marco & Ripa, Maddalena & Ulgiati, Sergio, 2015. "Dealing with waste products and flows in life cycle assessment and emergy accounting: Methodological overview and synergies," Ecological Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 315(C), pages 69-76.
    10. Yu, Xiaoman & Geng, Yong & Dong, Huijuan & Ulgiati, Sergio & Liu, Zhe & Liu, Zuoxi & Ma, Zhixiao & Tian, Xu & Sun, Lu, 2016. "Sustainability assessment of one industrial region: A combined method of emergy analysis and IPAT (Human Impact Population Affluence Technology)," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 107(C), pages 818-830.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:inecol:v:15:y:2011:i:4:p:550-567. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=1088-1980 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.