Towards a coherent multi-level framework for resource accounting

Abstract

With increasing resource scarcity and environmental impacts resulting from inefficient resource utilisation, accounting for resource consumption along the life cycle of a product or service becomes critical for designing production-consumption systems. This work aims at developing a coherent framework for resource accounting to support the evaluation of alternatives for production and consumption activities. The framework provides an understanding of resource utilisation at unit, process, inter-process and productionconsumption levels within a system. The multilevel characteristic of this framework allows a comprehensive and holistic view of a system with the potential to reveal how decisions at one level would affect other levels of the system. Based on such a multilevel view, a unique 1 adaptation of the Cumulative Exergy Resource Accounting method is proposed to quantify resource consumption associated with both technological and natural processes. This work also differentiates between and accounts for the operational resource consumption in resource extraction, agriculture and manufacturing and for the capital resource consumption for providing machinery and infrastructure. This is a practical framework for resource accounting that can be used by process engineers and local planners to support decision making regarding alternative system designs, gain insights on the performance of a production system and devise design options including retrofits for improving the overall resource efficiency of a system. By unfolding the resource consumption through each system layer, the framework provides a robust and transparent way to capture effects of decision making during design or retrofitting of processes in order to find the most efficient design options. In addition, the framework can also be applied to support research in other areas such as social, cultural and business. Finally, a case study on the production and consumption of sugarcane ethanol is used to illustrate the features of the proposed framework. The framework proved useful in assessing the effects on resource consumption for design decisions at the various levels, such as choosing between molecular sieve and azeotropic distillation at the unit level, adoption of water intra-recycling at the process level, and bagasse exchange flows at inter-process level. The proposed systematic approach has given powerful insights into how changes in resource consumption occur at different levels.

Economic analysis of using green accounting and environmental accounting to identify environmental costs and sustainability indicators

“…With increasing resource scarcity and environmental impacts resulting from inefficient resource utilization, accounting for resource consumption along the life cycle of a product or service becomes critical for designing production–consumption systems. Many environmental costs can be significantly reduced by making better business decisions for investing in more environment-friendly technologies (green industries) and re-designing processes and products because some of these costs may not add value to the system or product (Wan et al , 2015; Leung Pah Hang et al , 2016; Özokcu and Özdemir, 2017).…”

Insight-Based Approach for the Design of Integrated Local Food-Energy-Water Systems

“…Locally available resources identified from the ecological and agricultural layers can be classified into: (a) basic resources from existing ecosystems and the environment such as solar radiation, wind, forest biomass, that are unprocessed and unmanaged; and (b) managed resources such as cultivated biomass, food crops, and livestock. As suggested earlier, 27 the cost of the basic resources is simply measured by their exergy content, while that of the managed resources is quantified by the cumulated exergy consumption across all the steps and activities for producing the resources. The next layer is the industrial layer where industrial (including municipal) processing units are considered, such as those for food processing (e.g., bread production), energy conversion (e.g., solar panels), and water processing (for clean water supply or wastewater treatment).…”

“…Locally available resources identified from the ecological and agricultural layers can be classified into: a) basic resources from existing ecosystems and the environment such as solar radiation, wind, forest biomass, that are unprocessed and unmanaged; and b) managed resources such as cultivated biomass, food crops and livestock. As suggested earlier 27 , the cost of the basic resources is simply measured by their exergy content, while that of the managed resources is quantified by the cumulated exergy consumption across all the steps and activities for producing the resources.…”

A Framework for Modeling Local Production Systems with Techno‐Ecological Interactions

“…In fact, the cumulative resource consumption of each flow that enters a local production system has been considered in a separate work (Leung Pah Hang et al. , ). Besides, methodological frameworks have been presented by Hanes and Bakshi () and Bakshi and colleagues (), which address analyses across multiple scales.…”