Industrial ecology is the study of material and energy flows through industrial systems.
The global industrial economy can be modeled as a network of industrial processes that
extract resources from the Earth and transform those resources into commodities which can
be bought and sold to meet the needs of humanity. Industrial ecology seeks to quantify the material
flows and document the industrial processes that make modern society function. Industrial
ecologists are often concerned with the impacts that industrial activities have on the environment,
with use of the planet's supply of natural resources, and with problems of waste disposal.
Industrial ecology is a young but growing multidisciplinary field of research which
combines aspects of engineering, economics, sociology, toxicology and the natural sciences.
Industrial ecology has been defined as a "systems-based, multidisciplinary discourse that seeks to
understand emergent behaviour of complex integrated human/natural systems". 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 the analogy of natural systems should be used as an aid in understanding how to
design sustainable industrial systems.
Overview
Industrial ecology is concerned with the shifting of industrial process from linear systems,
in which resource and capital investments move through the system to become waste, to
a closed loop system where wastes can become inputs for new processes.
Much of the research focuses on the following areas:
material and energy flow studies dematerialization and decarbonization
technological change and the environment life-cycle planning, design and assessment
design for the environment extended producer responsibility
eco-industrial parks product-oriented environmental policy
eco-efficiency Industrial ecology seeks to understand the
way in which industrial systems interact with the biosphere. Natural ecosystems provide
a metaphor for understanding how different parts of industrial systems interact with
one another, in an "ecosystem" based on resources and infrastructural capital rather than on
natural capital. It seeks to exploit the idea that natural systems do not have waste in
them to inspire sustainable design. 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?" 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. The scientific field Industrial Ecology has
grown quickly in recent years. The Journal of Industrial Ecology, the International Society
for Industrial Ecology, and the journal Progress in Industrial Ecology 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. The hope is
that strategy such as this will create a more efficient economy with fewer pollutants and
other unwanted by-products. 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. The Kalundborg industrial park is located
in Denmark. This industrial park is special because companies reuse each other's waste.
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. 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.
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.
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, technical sciences and environmental
sciences. The challenge is to merge them into a single approach.
Tools Criticisms
The discipline of industrial ecology is to a large part based on the implicit assumption
that if “we just get our technologies right”, the problems of environmental pollution and
unsustainability will be solved. This is the reason why most current research in industrial
ecology is focused on technological innovation, such as improvements in eco-efficiency, design
for environment, material flow analysis, etc. This simplistic view has been recently questioned
by Huesemann and Huesemann who demonstrate that negative unintended consequences of technology
are inherently unpredictable and unavoidable, that most current techno-optimism reflected
in industrial ecology is unjustified, and that modern technology, in the presence of
continued economic growth, does not promote sustainability, but hastens collapse. Therefore,
more than technological tinkering is needed to achieve long-term sustainability. Most
importantly, the problem of human overpopulation must be addressed immediately and a transition
to a steady state economy is needed to guarantee environmental and societal sustainability.
Future directions The ecosystem metaphor popularized by Frosch
and Gallopoulos 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, and others. 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. To explore this further, several researchers are working with agent based modeling techniques
. Exergy analysis is performed in the field
of industrial ecology to use energy more efficiently. 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. 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, National Academy Press, Washington
DC, USA, 1997, ISBN 0-309-05294-7 'Handbook of Input-Output Economics in Industrial
Ecology', Sangwon Suh, Springer, 2009, ISBN 978-1-4020-6154-7
External links Academic/Research Programs
Erasmus Mundus Master's Programme in Industrial Ecology
Industrial Ecology MSc at Leiden University and TUDelft, the Netherlands
Industrial Ecology MSc at NTNU, Norway Industrial Ecology MSc at Chalmers University
of Technology, Sweden Sustainable Technology MSc at Royal Institute
of Technology, Sweden Research Centers/Institutes
University of Michigan Center for Sustainable Systems, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
Yale Center for Industrial Ecology, United States
The Eco-Efficiency Centre in Burnside, Nova Scotia, Canada
JRCIE - Joint Research Center for Industrial Ecology, China
University of Sydney - Complex Systems and Sustainability Research Group
Center for Resilience at Ohio State University Articles and books
Industrial Ecology: An Introduction Industrial Ecology
Industrial Symbiosis Timeline Journal of Industrial Ecology.
Industrial Ecology research & articles from The Program for the Human Environment, The
Rockefeller University