Sustainability Assessment through Emergy Evaluation Analysis: Agricultural Waste Utilization for Pulp Production Case Study

Abstract The concern for reducing environmental impacts in pulp and paper industries can be supported with the tools to measure the environmental impacts quantitatively, such as life cycle assessment (LCA) and Emergy Evaluation Analysis (EMA). The sources of potential agricultural wastes for pulp production in Indonesia include oil palm empty fruit bunch (EFB), sugarcane bagasse, bamboo, rice straw, and banana stem. In this study, the first attempt at EFB-based pulp production’s EMA has been done. The main tool for conducting this study was based on EMA and was supported by the LCA framework. The foreground data and model used in this study were based on literature related to pulp production from EFB. In addition, the background data was obtained from the life cycle inventory database. The EMA of EFB-based pulp production was based on emergy yield ratio (EYR), environmental loading ratio (ELR) and emergy sustainability index (ESI). The result shows that EFB-based pulp production has 1.23, 4.43 and 0.28 of EYR, ELR and ESI, respectively.