Exergy as a unified measure of water quality

Renewability and sustainability of biogas system: Cosmic exergy based assessment for a case in China

“…For the observer that faces the system and local environment, exergy is a measurement of the real resource availability [55][56][57][58]. For the system itself, exergy represents the aliveness and vitality of the system [59,60]. For the local environment, exergy is a description of environmental impact, in terms of the potential to change the status of the environment [61][62][63][64].…”

Unified process assessment for resources use and waste emissions by coal-fired power generation

“…Also, Ayres et al [25] concluded that exergy is appropriate for the production process analysis as a measure of waste emissions and potential for causing environmental harm and verified the advantages of exergy analysis over the standard approach using energy and mass. Recently, exergy has also been employed as a unitary and objective measure for water quality by Chen and co-workers [44,45]. Exergy values for air, water and solid wastes emitted from the production process of the concerned systems are calculated based on the previous studies.…”

The Characteristics of the Exergy Reference Environment and Its Implications for Sustainability-Based Decision-Making

“…The connection between the exergy content of waste and its environmental impact has been proposed by several authors [7,8,10,17,23,[30][31][32][33][34]. For example, Ao et al [22] argue that exergy can be viewed as "a measure of the departure of a substance from equilibrium with a specified reference environment, which is often modeled as the actual environment", and that "the exergy of an emission to the environment, therefore, is a measure of the potential of the emission to change or impact the environment".…”