Multi-System Urban Waste-Energy Self-Circulation: Design of Urban Self-Circulation System Based on Emergy Analysis

Xiaoyu Xu
Additional contact information
Xiaoyu Xu: Landscape Architecture Department, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI 02903, USA

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 14, 1-26

Abstract: The current worldwide state of energy scarcity and low waste utilization has led to a decrease in the supply of ecological services, something that seriously affects the development of cities. In this study, we propose an urban self-circulation design based on multiple systems within the traditional biogas, wetland, rainwater, solar power, and urban farm systems framework to achieve effective improvements in urban waste utilization and the optimization of the urban waste–energy flow cycle. Emergy conversion is used to evaluate system optimization, and the simulation results show that the novel proposed system can effectively improve urban waste utilization with an energy output rate of 3.18 × 10, an environmental load of 4.27 × 10 ?2 , and a sustainability index of 7.45 × 10 2 in the core system; additionally, it can improve resource utilization of small-scale cities with an energy output rate of 1.85 × 10 0 , an environmental load of 1.20 × 10 0 , and a sustainability index of 1.54 × 10 0 in the total system. The inter-system energy flow model can significantly optimize urban energy systems based on ecological models with low-emergy resource input, including biogas systems and urban farm systems. This model can reduce the environmental load and effectively compensate for the reduced supply capacity of ecosystem services caused by urbanization, making it suitable for extension to other small-scale built environments that are relatively independent and rich in natural resources.

Keywords: urban systems; sustainability; emergy evaluation; ecosystem services; energy reconfiguration; energy-waste flow cycle; regional ecosystem management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/14/7538/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/14/7538/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:18:y:2021:i:14:p:7538-:d:594865

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().