Sustainability evaluation of an e-waste treatment enterprise based on emergy analysis in China

The e-waste issue is drawing increasing attention in China as a result of the country's rapid course of industrialization and modernization. The potential environmental pollution from e-waste makes evaluating the overall eco-efficiency of e-waste treatment enterprises a critical need for environmental sound management of e-waste, and a great challenge academically. The emergy analysis method can link economic and ecological systems together, highlighting the internal relationships among the different subsystems and components. Therefore, this method was used in this study to evaluate the sustainability of an e-waste treatment enterprise. Considering the characteristics of the e-waste treatment process, the traditional emergy indices were improved, and two new emergy indices were put forward to analyze the emergy recovery rate and technical level of the e-waste treatment enterprise. The research results show that the e-waste treatment enterprise can generate large economic benefits, and its environmental impact can be relatively moderate; however, the e-waste treatment enterprise had a relatively low emergy recovery rate and technical level in 2010. Finally, the emergy sustainability index (ESI) indicated that the e-waste treatment enterprise could have a sustainable contribution to both the economy and the environment for moderate periods into the future. The study will provide some useful decisions support to the enterprise managers, so that they may make appropriate policies toward sustainable development or maturation of their enterprise. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.