Study On Evaluation And Application Of Cleaner Production In Sea Cucumber Industry Based On Life Cycle Assessment

Sea cucumber is one of the most important aquaculture species in China,sea cucumber industry has become the mainstay industry in coastal areas of northern China,With the rapid increase of the scale and intensity of production,the problems of resource and environment in the sea cucumber industry have also appeared.These problems mainly include high resources and energy consumption,large waste emissions and a lack of coordination in the selection of partners for upstream and downstream enterprises based on environmental performance.As an environmental strategy,Cleaner Production,which can effectively identify the key nodes of environmental impact in the production process and provide an implementation approach for resource management and pollution control in the sea cucumber industry,has been continuously applied in all aspects of the production process,products,and services.The research on Cleaner Production in the sea cucumber industry in China is in its infancy,which lacks of Cleaner Production assessment technology,an indicator system of production enterprises,and the green optimization of supply chain network system between the upstream and downstream enterprises.Based on the above-mentioned challenges,the present study aimed to investigate the evaluation and application of Cleaner Production in the sea cucumber industry,expanding the system boundary of Cleaner Production from the internal enterprise to supply chain network.The research involved life cycle environmental impact assessment,a Cleaner Production assessment indicator system,and green supply chain network design and optimization in the sea cucumber industry.The above researches can provide technical support and practical guidance for the implementation of Cleaner Production at the enterprise scale and supply chain scale in sea cucumber industry,which has important theoretical significance and application value.The main conclusions of this study were as follows:(1)Life cycle inventories and environmental impacts were established and analyzed quantitatively based on the actual production data in sea cucumber production process and technologies.The life cycle environmental impact assessment results showed that the impact potential of indoor artificial feeding,beach pond aquaculture,and salted sea cucumber processing stages were 1.21E-08 yr,7.39E-09 yr,and 1,11E-09 yr,respectively.The indoor artificial feeding stage has the largest environment impact;Marine Aquatic Ecotoxicity Potential(MAETP)was the largest environmental impact category;and electricity and fossil energy consumption and the large demand for seawater were the key factors that influenced the environment impact results in the sea cucumber production process.The results of the life cycle environmental impact assessment of sea cucumber production technologies showed that the impact potential of ecological cage feeding and offshore aquaculture were 1.15E-09 yr and 4.16E-10 yr,and compared with using indoor artificial feeding and beach pond aquaculture,the impact potentials were reduced to 90.50%and 94.37%,respectively.This confirmed that two ecological technologies mentioned above have the advantage of reducing the environmental impact of sea cucumber production process.The environmental impact improvement measures such as adjusting the power energy categories were proposed based on life cycle assessment results in this paper.(2)A Cleaner Production assessment indicator systems for sea cucumber industry was established,which includes feeding,aquaculture,and processing three aspects.In the present study,the suitability of the production area,as a first-grade indicator,was incorporated into the sea cucumber feeding and aquaculture Cleaner Production assessment indicator system.The Analytic Hierarchy Process was used to determine the indicator weights.Two sea cucumber production enterprises in Dalian city were selected as case studies to assess the Cleaner Production level.The results of the case study analysis showed that the Cleaner Production level of feeding,farming,and processing stages in the two enterprises was the domestic advanced level of Cleaner Production.We concluded that although the Cleaner Production levels in the case enterprises were reasonable,they still had room for improvement.The above assessment results were consistent with the actual enterprise production conditions,confirming the applicability of the Cleaner Production assessment indicator system for the sea cucumber industry developed in the present study.Finally,according to the assessment results,the key nodes and the improvement measures to implement Cleaner Production in feeding,aquaculture,and processing stage of the case enterprises were discussed.(3)Aim to the problems and disadvantages in sea cucumber supply chain,from the perspective of enterprises,this study established a green supply chain partners screening method for sea cucumber production enterprises,this method can guide the enterprise to choose the best partner of green supply chain.From the perspective of supply chain,this study built a sea cucumber industry green supply chain integrated nexus network based on three factors(green production,green purchase and green consumption),three hierarchies(node enterprise,technical mode and supply function),and three performances(environment,economy and production).On this basis,a green supply chain network optimization model was built and the optimization goals were comprehensive energy consumption minimization and product profit maximization,this model can provide the technical support to build sea cucumber green supply chain network.Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm and the Modified-Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution were used as optimization methods to carry out a network optimization case study.In the case study,four optimization scenarios of green supply chain networks were set up with the constraints of raw materials purchase quantity and market demand.The results showed that scenario S4(ecological cage feeding-offshore aquaculture-high-quality salt processing-store sales)had the best comprehensive performance,with a minimum comprehensive energy consumption of 51600 kgce(kilogram of coal equivalent)and a maximum product profit of 11.85 million RMB.We concluded that Cleaner Production in the supply chain of the sea cucumber industry should be implemented using green production,green purchase,and green consumption to reduce the environmental impact in the supply chain and improve resource utilization efficiency and product profit.