The environmental sustainability assessment of building ceramic manufacturing based on the LCA-emergy approach

Junxue Zhang (), He Zhang, Ashish T. Asutosh, Nameng Sun and Xindi Li
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Junxue Zhang: Jiangsu University of Science and Technology
He Zhang: University of Florida
Ashish T. Asutosh: University of Florida
Nameng Sun: Shanghai Technical Institute of Electronics and Information
Xindi Li: Jingdezhen Ceramic University

Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, 2025, vol. 27, issue 3, No 16, 5999-6024

Abstract: Abstract As the world’s largest ceramics producer and exporter, China’s ceramic industry is being sharply watched because of excessive resource consumption and pressing environmental issues. Given the specific performances of the ceramic production system, a full set of improved emergy indicators have been adopted to assess environmental sustainability. By taking a typical building ceramic tile plant as an example, this paper conducted a case study, including emergy analysis, ecological indicators, sensitivity analysis, and industrial pollutant emergy analysis (exhaust gas, wastewater, and solid waste). The results demonstrate that (1) non-renewable resource accounts for 57.7% of the total emergy amount and is the primary factor for the emergy analysis; (2) clay is the major contributor to non-renewable resource emergy (26% of the entire emergy; (3) emergy sustainability index is 0.041, which displays poor environmental sustainability; (4) the unit emergy value of building ceramic tile plant is 4.01E+12 sej/kg in the paper; (5) sensitivity analysis results of two assumptions illustrate the non-renewable resources has the biggest fluctuation (5.77%) in hypothesis 1 and the clay (2.63%) have the dominant status in hypothesis 2; (6) the solid waste is the major contributor and accounts for 3.69% of the entire emergy and 95.56% of the industrial pollutant emergy. In light of comprehensive discussions, two positive measures are proposed to improve environmental sustainability, containing enhancing the proportion of renewable energy input and recycling material replacement, respectively.

Keywords: Ceramic system; Emergy analysis; Sustainability; Pollution evaluation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1007/s10668-023-04114-y

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