Entropy production plays a fundamental role in the study of nonequilibrium systems by offering a quantitative handle on the degree of time-reversal symmetry breaking. It depends crucially on the degree of freedom considered as well as on the scale of description. How the entropy production at one resolution of the degrees of freedom is related to the entropy production at another resolution is a fundamental question which has recently attracted interest. This relationship is of particular relevance to coarse-grained and continuum descriptions of a given phenomenon. In this work, we derive the scaling of the entropy production under iterative coarse graining on the basis of the correlations of the underlying microscopic transition rates for noninteracting particles in active disordered media. Our approach unveils a natural criterion to distinguish equilibrium-like and genuinely nonequilibrium macroscopic phenomena based on the sign of the scaling exponent of the entropy production per mesostate.

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• Entropy production
• Nonequilibrium & irreversible thermodynamics
• Random walks
• Statistical field theory
• Disordered systems
• Coarse graining