Assessing environmental performance of eco-industrial development in industrial parks

While driving the regional economy, industrial parks also pose great threats to natural environment due to large quantities of resource consumption and intensive pollutants emissions. Eco-industrial development, including cleaner production, bioproducts or waste interchange, and infrastructure sharing, is key to improving the parks’ environmental quality and sustainability. However, how to measure the performance of eco-industrial development is an essential and hard work since the material and energy flows are complex and cannot be compared in various units. The water and non-renewable resources which are very vital materials to sustain industrial activities in the industrial parks were rarely considered in the previous traditional ecological footprint analysis. Therefore, our research depicts a real picture of all the resources including water and non-renewable resources to illustrate the actual environmental impact of a national high technology industrial development zone-Jiangyin high technology Park, using energy based ecological footprint method. Results show that the emergy-ecological footprint deficit and emergy-ecological footprint intensity of the study park decreased by 16.75% and 16.74% due to the implementation of eco-industrial development. In detail, minerals made the largest reduction, 2.00E + 2 ha/capita, followed by fossil fuels with a reduction of 1.01E + 2 ha/capita, and the resources from cropland and pasture did not make a contribution in reducing emergy ecological footprint. Policy implications such as further replenishing and improving the ecological industry chains are proposed based on this survey. This study provides a basis to improve the environmental management and performance of industrial parks.