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Nowadays industrial parks have played a massive role in promoting regional economic development. However, due to intensive industrial activities and enormous energy consumption, industrial parks have become the main areas for pollution emissions. China has carried out the National Demonstration Eco-industrial Parks program to solve such challenges. Industrial symbiosis is the kernel of industrial ecological construction. It aims at promoting several companies to gather in a same geographical site to share services, utility, and by-products in order to decrease environmental impacts of their industrial activities. However how to quantify the impact of industrial symbiosis on improving the sustainability of an industrial park is rarely studied. This study proposed an emergy analysis to conduct an assessment on Hefei economic and technological development area to quantify the performance of industrial symbiosis. Comparing with conventional evaluation methods, emergy analysis can reflect the real contribution of local ecosystem by focusing on nature's free investment, not only the economic value or the resources supplied to the industrial system. Research results show that industrial symbiosis operations improve the study area's sustainable development ability by 33%. Specifically, non-renewable inputs, imported resource inputs, and associated services could be saved by 99.71%, 25.64%, and 9.82%, and the ratio of the money saving to the total gross domestic product of the industrial park would be 29.71%. By examining industrial symbiosis practices in detail within the system, this paper can describe the process of the industrial symbiosis and how these industrial symbiosis practices influence the overall performance of the industrial park. This study indicates that industrial symbiosis could effectively reduce raw materials and energy consumption and improve the overall sustainability, which can help policy-makers make decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]