Industrial Ecology - Overview

Overview

Industrial ecology is concerned with 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 can become inputs for new processes.

Much of the research focuses on the following areas:

• 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 seeks to understand the way in which industrial systems (for example a factory, an ecoregion, or national or global economy) 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.