LAUSR

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.