Sustainable resource management for technology: features of thermodynamics

A recent paper of Huijbregts and colleagues (Huijbregts et al., 2010) demonstrates that a number of emission impacts by all kind of technologies are strongly related to the resource intake, in particular energy input. Definitely, sustainable process design should rather start with energy and resource needs than emission considerations. In this contribution, it will be demonstrated what thermodynamics, and especially exergy analysis (EA) and exergetic life cycle analysis (ELCA) can offer here. This will be illustrated with work recently published or to be published in the journals Environmental Science & Technology, Green Chemistry, and Resources Conservation and Recycling.