Emergy analysis and assessment for a high-end industrial park

As the basic unit for eco-city development, industrial park significantly contributes to the national environment protection and eco-civilization. This paper established an emergy-based evaluation framework, simulating the emergy storage and flows, to identify the input-output of the high-end industrial park. The emergy-based indicator system of the industrial park is also set up, including structural indices and functional indices, so as to assess the environmental impacts of the industrial park on the surrounding ecosystems. The results show that the sustainability of local environment is not optimistic due to the large amount of emergy input from outside imposed on surrounding environment of the industrial park. Full of central, technical and service industries, the high-end industrial park has lower materials demand compared to the traditional parks. The major emergy inputs cover materials, energy, labor, of which labor and service emergy contribute almost 90%, fitting well with the characteristics of highly-concentrated sci-tech talents and headquarter role of the park. The high-end industrial park has a higher level of emergy density and per capita emergy, indicating a high level of regional development and emergy hierarchy. Although there are concentrated emergy flows, the emergy yield ratio is lower than 100%, implying the park has the potential to develop rapidly due to the emergy surplus. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd.