Environmental Support for Dilution of Pollutants from Broiler Production and Aquaculture in Brazil

Abstract

Due to the rising demand for food, increasing intensive livestock production contributes significantly to the anthropogenic loading of the biosphere. Poultry and fish from intensive operations are a primary source for global human food consumption, and the contribution to air and water emissions. The environment can act as a sink of emissions by using it the capacity for diluting pollutants. In this way, the "support area" derived from the renewable resources supplied by region was quantified for both enterprises regarding emergy. Results suggest that poultry production seems to be a thousand times more "eco-efficient" than aquaculture as well as presenting a lower support area. Accounting for the environmental services required to dilute emissions is shown to be a necessary procedure towards the proper evaluation of long-term sustainability and quantification of externalities.

The emergy-data envelopment analysis (EM-DEA) approach handbook: An illustrated guide on how to use the EM-DEA approach to assess resource- and energy-use efficiency and the sustainability of agricultural and forestry ecosystems

“…The EMA method is based on thermodynamics and systems theory. The concept of energy memory (emergy) is useful for environmental and economic accounting, because it provides the means to evaluate resources on the basis of the environmental work required to generate and make resources available in a system (Bonilla et al 2016). EMA offers the flexibility to account for various resources in a system through the quantification of material and energy flows as emergy.…”

“…The concept of emergy means that the available energy (i.e., exergy or available energy content) of diverse resource types can be accounted for on the basis of their embodied energy (Scienceman 1987;Brown and Herendeen 1996). This enables accounting of all natural and socioeconomic inputs on a common metric (Bonilla et al 2016). The emergy of a given resource is calculated as the mathematical product of the exergy and the unit emergy value (UEV) of a given resource, as stated in Equation 1.…”

A Holistic Method of Assessing Efficiency and Sustainability in Agricultural Production Systems

“…The concept of energy memory (Emergy) is useful for environmental accounting, i.e. to evaluate resources on the basis of the environmental work that is required to generate and make resources available (Bonilla et al, 2016). Emergy is defined as the "the energy of one type previously used up directly and indirectly to make a product or deliver a service", and it is measured in solar emjoule (sej) .…”

“…This method is based on thermodynamics and systems theory, and hence enables the accounting of all natural and socio-economic inputs on a common metric, i.e. the sej (Bonilla et al, 2016). Thus, Emergy Accounting (EMA) provides a means to account for resources such as nature, materials, energy, resource generation time, labor, economic and societal infrastructures including other resources whose market value are ambiguous to monetized .…”