Industrial ecology

Industrial Ecology (IE) has been defined as a "systems-based, multidisciplinary discourse that seeks to understand emergent behaviour of complex integrated human/natural systems"^[1]. The field approaches issues of sustainability by examining problems from multiple perspectives, usually involving aspects of sociology, the environment, economy and technology. The name comes from the idea that we should use the analogy of natural systems as an aid in understanding how to design sustainable industrial systems^[2].

Contents 1 Overview 2 History 3 Principles 4 Tools 5 Future directions 6 See also 7 References 8 Further reading 9 External links

Overview

Industrial ecology is the shifting of industrial process from linear (open loop) systems, in which resource and capital investments move through the system to become waste, to a closed loop system where wastes become inputs for new processes.

Much of the research focuses on the following areas:^[3]

• material and energy flow studies ("industrial metabolism")
• dematerialization and decarbonization
• technological change and the environment
• life-cycle planning, design and assessment
• design for the environment ("eco-design")
• extended producer responsibility ("product stewardship")
• eco-industrial parks ("industrial symbiosis")
• product-oriented environmental policy
• eco-efficiency

Industrial ecology proposes not to see industrial systems (for example a factory, an ecoregion, or national or global economy) as being separate from the biosphere, but to consider it as a particular case of an ecosystem - but based on infrastructural capital rather than on natural capital. It is the idea that as natural systems do not have waste in them, we should model our systems after natural ones if we want them to be sustainable.

Along with more general energy conservation and material conservation goals, and redefining commodity markets and product stewardship relations strictly as a service economy, industrial ecology is one of the four objectives of Natural Capitalism. This strategy discourages forms of amoral purchasing arising from ignorance of what goes on at a distance and implies a political economy that values natural capital highly and relies on more instructional capital to design and maintain each unique industrial ecology.

History

Industrial ecology was popularized in 1989 in a Scientific American article by Robert Frosch and Nicholas E. Gallopoulos. Frosch and Gallopoulos' vision was "why would not our industrial system behave like an ecosystem, where the wastes of a species may be resource to another species? Why would not the outputs of an industry be the inputs of another, thus reducing use of raw materials, pollution, and saving on waste treatment?"^[2] A notable example resides in a Danish industrial park in the city of Kalundborg. Here several linkages of byproducts and waste heat can be found between numerous entities such as a large power plant, an oil refinery, a pharmaceutical plant, a plasterboard factory, an enzyme manufacturer, a waste company and the city itself.^[4]

The scientific field Industrial Ecology has grown quickly in recent years. The Journal of Industrial Ecology (since 1997), the International Society for Industrial Ecology (since 2001), and the journal Progress in Industrial Ecology (since 2004) give Industrial Ecology a strong and dynamic position in the international scientific community. Industrial Ecology principles are also emerging in various policy realms such as the concept of the Circular Economy that is being promoted in China. Although the definition of the Circular Economy has yet to be formalized, generally the focus is on strategies such as creating a circular flow of materials, and cascading energy flows. An example of this would be using waste heat from one process to run another process that requires a lower temperature. This maximizes the efficiency of exergy use. The hope is that strategy such as this will create a more efficient economy with fewer pollutants and other unwanted by products^[5].

Principles

One of the central principles of Industrial Ecology is the view that societal and technological systems are bounded within the biosphere, and do not exist outside of it. Ecology is used as a metaphor due to the observation that natural systems reuse materials and have a largely closed loop cycling of nutrients. Industrial Ecology approaches problems with the hypothesis that by using similar principles as natural systems, industrial systems can be improved to reduce their impact on the natural environment as well. The table shows the general metaphor.

Biosphere	Technosphere
Environment Organism Natural Product Natural Selection Ecosystem Ecological Niche Anabolism / Catabolism Mutation and Selection Succession Adaptation Food Web	Market Company Industrial Product Competition Eco-Industrial Park Market Niche Manufacturing / Waste Management Design for Environment Economic Growth Innovation Product Life Cycle

The Kalundborg industrial park is located in Denmark. This industrial park is special because companies reuse each others' waste (which then becomes by-products). For example, the Energy E2 Asnæs Power Station produces gypsum as a by product of the electricity generation process; this gypsum becomes a resource for the BPB Gyproc A/S which produces plasterboards^[4]. This is one example of a system inspired by the biosphere-technosphere metaphor: in ecosystems, the waste from one organism is used as inputs to other organisms; in industrial systems, waste from a company is used as a resource by others.

Apart from the direct benefit of incorporating waste into the loop, the use of an eco-industrial park can be a means of making renewable energy generating plants, like Solar PV, more economical and environmentally friendly. In essence, this assists the growth of the renewable energy industry and the environmental benefits that come with replacing fossil-fuels.^[6]

IE examines societal issues and their relationship with both technical systems and the environment. Through this holistic view , IE recognizes that solving problems must involve understanding the connections that exist between these systems, various aspects cannot be viewed in isolation. Often changes in one part of the overall system can propagate and cause changes in another part. Thus, you can only understand a problem if you look at its parts in relation to the whole. Based on this framework, IE looks at environmental issues with a systems thinking approach.

Take a city for instance. A city can be divided into commercial areas, residential areas, offices, services, infrastructures, etc. These are all sub-systems of the 'big city’ system. Problems can emerge in one sub-system, but the solution has to be global. Let’s say the price of housing is rising dramatically because there is too high a demand for housing. One solution would be to build new houses, but this will lead to more people living in the city, leading to the need of more infrastructure like roads, schools, more supermarkets, etc. This system is a simplified interpretation of reality whose behaviors can be ‘predicted’.

In many cases, the systems IE deals with are complex systems. Complexity makes it difficult to understand the behavior of the system and may lead to rebound effects. Due to unforeseen behavioral change of users or consumers, a measure taken to improve environmental performance does not lead to any improvement or may even worsen the situation. For instance, in big cities, traffic can become problematic. Let's imagine the government wants to reduce air pollution and makes a policy stating that only cars with an even license plate number can drive on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Odd license plate numbers can drive on Wednesdays and Fridays. Finally, the other days, both cars are allowed on the roads. The first effect could be that people buy a second car, with a specific demand for license plate numbers, so they can drive every day. The rebound effect is that, the days when all cars are allowed to drive, some inhabitants now use both cars (whereas they only had one car to use before the policy). The policy did obviously not lead to environmental improvement but even made air pollution worse.

Moreover, life cycle thinking is also a very important principle in industrial ecology. It implies that all environmental impacts caused by a product, system, or project during its life cycle are taken into account. In this context life cycle includes

• Raw material extraction
• Material processing
• Manufacture
• Use
• Maintenance
• Disposal

The transport necessary between these stages is also taken into account as well as, if relevant, extra stages such as reuse, remanufacture, and recycle. Adopting a life cycle approach is essential to avoid shifting environmental impacts from one life cycle stage to another. This is commonly referred to as problem shifting. For instance, during the re-design of a product, one can choose to reduce its weight, thereby decreasing use of resources. However, it is possible that the lighter materials used in the new product will be more difficult to dispose of. The environmental impacts of the product gained during the extraction phase are shifted to the disposal phase. Overall environmental improvements are thus null.

A final and important principle of IE is its integrated approach or multidisciplinarity. IE takes into account three different disciplines: social sciences (including economics), technical sciences and environmental sciences. The challenge is to merge them into a single approach.

Tools

People	Planet	Profit	Modeling
Stakeholder analysis Strength Weakness Opportunities Threats Analysis (SWOT Analysis) Ecolabelling ISO 14000 Environmental management system (EMS) Integrated chain management (ICM) Technology assessment	Environmental impact assessment (EIA) Input-output analysis (IOA) Life cycle analysis (LCA) Material flow analysis (MFA) Substance flow analysis (SFA) MET Matrix	Cost benefit analysis (CBA) Full cost accounting (FCA) Life cycle costing (LCC)	Stock and flow analysis Agent based modeling

Future directions

The ecosystem metaphor popularized by Frosch and Gallopoulos^[2] has been a valuable creative tool for helping researchers look for novel solutions to difficult problems. Recently, it has been pointed out that this metaphor is based largely on a model of classical ecology, and that advancements in understanding ecology based on complexity science have been made by researchers such as C. S. Holling, James J. Kay^[7], and others^[8]. For industrial ecology, this may mean a shift from a more mechanistic view of systems, to one where sustainability is viewed as an emergent property of a complex system ^[9][10]. To explore this further, several researchers are working with agent based modeling techniques ^[11][12].

Exergy analysis is performed in the field of industrial ecology to use energy more efficiently^[13]. The term exergy was coined by Zoran Rant in 1956, but the concept was developed by J. Willard Gibbs. In recent decades, utilization of exergy has spread outside of physics and engineering to the fields of industrial ecology, ecological economics, systems ecology, and energetics.

Recently, there has been work advocating for large scale photovoltaic production facilities in an industrial ecology setting^[14]. These facilities not only reduce their environmental impact but also decrease the costs of photovoltaic productions to as little as $1 per Watt by economy of scale.

See also

References

Further reading

• The industrial green game: implications for environmental design and management, Deanna J Richards (Ed), National Academy Press, Washington DC, USA, 1997, ISBN 0-309-05294-7
• 'Handbook of Input-Output Economics in Industrial Ecology', Sangwon Suh (Ed), Springer, 2009, ISBN 978-1402061547

External links

Academic/Research Programs

• The Eco-Efficiency Centre in Burnside, Nova Scotia, Canada
• Yale Center for Industrial Ecology, United States
• International MSc programme Industrial Ecology, Netherlands
• Industrial Ecology Programme at NTNU, Norway
• International MSc programme in Industrial Ecology at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
• Industrial Ecology research from The Program for the Human Environment, The Rockefeller University
• JRCIE - Joint Research Center for Industrial Ecology, China
• Ecotechnology - Mid Sweden University, Östersund
• University of Sydney - Complex Systems and Sustainability Research Group
• Center for Resilience at Ohio State University

Articles & Books

• Industrial Ecology: An Introduction
• Industrial Ecology
• Industrial Symbiosis Timeline
• Journal of Industrial Ecology (Yale University on behalf of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies).

v • d • e Topics in industrial ecology Tools Agent based modeling · Cost benefit analysis · DPSIR · Ecolabel · Ecological footprint · Environmental impact assessment · Environmental management system · Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment · Full cost accounting · Input-output analysis · Integrated chain management · ISO 14000 · Life cycle analysis · Life cycle costing · Material flow analysis · MET Matrix · Stakeholder analysis Concepts Cradle to cradle · Dematerialization · Eco-efficiency · Eco-industrial park · Ecological modernization · Efficient energy use · Exergy · Extended producer responsibility · Industrial metabolism · Industrial symbiosis · Pollution prevention · Life cycle assessment · Polluter pays principle · Precautionary principle · Rebound effect · Waste hierarchy · Waste minimisation Related Fields Cleaner Production · Design for Environment · Earth systems engineering and management · Ecological economics · Environmental economics · Green Chemistry · Sustainable Development Examples Ecopark · Kalundborg Eco-industrial Park · National Industrial Symbiosis Programme

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