Accounting for the emergy value of life cycle inventory systems: insights from recent methodological advances

Arbault, Damien; Rugani, Benedetto; Marvuglia, Antonino; Tiruta-Barna, Ligia; Benetto, Enrico

doi:10.5890/jeam.2013.05.001

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 66 publications

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“…First, emergy analysis suffers from some methodological shortcomings linked, for example, to the uncertainties in the calculation and application of unit emergy values (Hau and Bakshi ; Hudson and Tilley ; Arbault et al. ; Li et al. ).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Complexity of Life Cycle Inventory Networks: Role of Life Cycle Processes with Network Analysis

Gutiérrez

Rugani

Pigné

et al. 2015

J of Industrial Ecology

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Determining the relevance and importance of a technosphere process or a cluster of processes in relation to the rest of the industrial network can provide insights into the sustainability of supply chains: those that need to be optimized or controlled/safeguarded. Network analysis (NA) can offer a broad framework of indicators to tackle this problem. In this article, we present a detailed analysis of a life cycle inventory (LCI) model from an NA perspective. Specifically, the network is represented as a directed graph and the "emergy" numeraire is used as the weight associated with the arcs of the network. The case study of a technological system for drinking water production is presented. We investigate the topological and structural characteristics of the network representation of this system and compare properties of its weighted and unweighted network, as well as the importance of nodes (i.e., life cycle unit processes). By identifying a number of advantages and limitations linked to the modeling complexity of such emergy-LCI networks, we classify the LCI technosphere network of our case study as a complex network belonging to the scale-free network family. The salient feature of this network family is represented by the presence of "hubs": nodes that connect with many other nodes. Hub failures may imply relevant changes, decreases, or even breaks in the connectedness with other smaller hubs and nodes of the network. Hence, by identifying node centralities, we can rank and interpret the relevance of each node for its special role in the life cycle network. Keywords:complexity drinking water emergy industrial ecology life cycle assessment (LCA) network analysis Supporting information is available on the JIE Web site

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%