Finnish Environment Institute SYKE, Helsinki, Finland.
Environ Sci Technol. 2010 Jun 1;44(11):4309-14. doi: 10.1021/es902673m.
Industrial symbiosis, representing resource sharing and byproduct use among colocated firms, is a key concept of industrial ecology. Local co-operation in industrial symbioses can reduce raw material use and waste disposal, but material and energy flows extending outside symbiosis boundaries can cause considerable environmental impacts. These external impacts are often ignored in industrial symbiosis studies. In this study, we compared process, hybrid and input-output life cycle assessment (LCA) approaches in quantifying the overall environmental impacts of a forest industrial symbiosis, situated in Kymenlaakso, Finland. Conclusions from an earlier process-LCA were strengthened by the use of hybrid-LCA as local emissions were found to cause less than half of the global impacts. In some impact categories, the whole impact was caused by supply chain emissions (land use, metal depletion and ozone depletion). The cutoff in process-LCA was found to be less than 25%, except in metal depletion and terrestrial ecotoxicity. Input-output LCA approximated hybrid-LCA results well in most impact categories, but seriously underestimated land use and overestimated terrestrial ecotoxicity. Based on the results we conclude, that input-output based LCA can be used to analyze the global impacts of an industrial symbiosis, but a careful interpretation of the results is necessary in order to understand the influence of aggregation and allocation.
工业共生代表了同地企业之间的资源共享和副产品利用，是工业生态学的一个关键概念。工业共生中的本地合作可以减少原材料的使用和废物处理，但延伸到共生边界之外的物质和能量流可能会造成相当大的环境影响。这些外部影响在工业共生研究中经常被忽视。在这项研究中，我们比较了过程、混合和投入产出生命周期评估（LCA）方法，以量化位于芬兰凯门洛托地区的森林工业共生的总体环境影响。混合 LCA 的使用加强了早期过程 LCA 的结论，因为发现本地排放造成的全球影响不到一半。在某些影响类别中，整个影响是由供应链排放（土地利用、金属消耗和臭氧消耗）造成的。除了金属消耗和陆地生态毒性外，过程 LCA 的截止值小于 25%。投入产出 LCA 在大多数影响类别中很好地近似于混合 LCA 的结果，但严重低估了土地利用，高估了陆地生态毒性。根据结果，我们得出结论，基于投入产出的 LCA 可用于分析工业共生的全球影响，但需要仔细解释结果，以了解聚集和分配的影响。
