Exergy based renewability assessment: Case study to ecological wastewater treatment

The renewability assessment has seldom been a core issue in previous studies. This work presents a framework to assess the renewability of a production system based on the unified ecological evaluation method of embodied cosmic exergy analysis. For the first time, both historical renewable and nonrenewable resources uses of each social product input of a system are individually and completely traced and measured by the embodied cosmic exergy as available energy. A set of indicators have also been devised to assess the resources utilization efficiency and renewability of a production system. To demonstrate the framework, a case study is carried out for a pilot constructed wetland wastewater treatment system in Beijing. The resources utilization style and renewability of the case system are analyzed and assessed. The presented framework can be easily transplanted to assess the renewability of other products, which could contribute a lot to meet the goal of sustainable development. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.