Research on eco-efficiency of industrial parks in Taiwan

Abstract

In the current global industrial development trend, creating economic benefits is no longer the sole objective of industrial development. Increasing emphasis is being placed to the concept of compatible and perpetual development of economy, environment, and society, and it has begun to advocate using “eco-efficiency” to measure the relation between economic value and environmental impact. Furthermore, the eco-industrial park has also become the best channel for realizing industrial perpetual development. Looking back on the development path of the industrial park in Taiwan, over the decade of building eco-industrial parks, we have attached more importance to building Recycling Eco-Town-and-Country as our industrial development vision on a macroscopic level, besides our efforts in the industrial ecology on microscopic and intermediate levels. Local and international policy recommendations have also called for the eco-efficiency of industrial parks. Through reviewing literature, that past indicative system and evaluation method for the eco-efficiency, without considering the three aspects of sustainability, is not applicable for the comparison between industrial parks. Therefore, the research aims to demonstrate the sustainability of the industrial park through a set of objective and comprehensive evaluation model.\n\nThis research aims to build an economy and environment eco-efficiency measurement model. The research evaluates the industrial eco-efficiency based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model by using panel date of 60 industrial parks in Taiwan, assessing the Technical Efficiency(TE), Pure Technical Efficiency(PTE) and Scale Efficiency(SE), and taking regional exploration and comparison.\n\nAccording to the research result, there remains a big improvement space for many industrial parks about eco-efficiency. Overall, in the event of excessive power consumption, only 15 industrial parks have reached the most appropriate scale and developed relative eco-efficiency; other industrial parks are all in an inefficient status and require identifying possible improvement directions and degrees through slack variable analysis, making improvement strategy to enhance their eco-efficiency.