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Sustainable Development and Industrial Ecology
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The goals of industry must be the preservation and improvement of the
environment. With increasing industrial activity all over the world new ways
have to be developed to make large improvements to industrial interactions
with the environment.
An open industrial system – one that takes in materials and energy,
creates products, and waste materials and then throws most of these away –
will probably not continue indefinitely and will have to be replaced by a dif-
ferent system. This system would involve, among other things, paying more
attention to where materials end up, and choosing materials and manufac-
turing processes to generate a more circular flow. Until quite recently,
industrial societies have attempted to deal with pollution and other forms of
waste largely through regulation. Although this strategy has been partially
successful, it has not really gotten to the root of the problem. To do so will
require a new paradigm for our industrial system – an industrial ecology
whose processes resemble those of a natural ecosystem (Frosch, 1994).
Industrial ecology (IE) is the study of industrial systems that operate
more like natural ecosystems. A natural ecosystem tends to evolve in such
a way that any available source of useful material or energy will be used by
some organism in the system. Animals and plants live on each other’s waste
matter. Materials and energy tend to circulate in a complex web of interac-
tions: animal wastes and dead plant material are metabolized by microor-
ganisms and turned into forms that are useful nutrients for plants. The
plants in turn may be eaten by animals or die, decay and go around the cycle
again. These systems do, of course, leave some waste materials; otherwise
we would have no fossil fuels. But on the whole the system regulates itself
and consumes what it produces (Frosch, 1994).
Industrial ecology is a new approach to the analysis and design of sus-
tainable political economies (Frosch, 1995). Allenby (1999) calls industrial ecol-
ogy the science of sustainability. Several other characteristics of stable
ecosystems also suggest new norms to pursue in thinking about sustainability.
Prigogine (1955) observed several very interesting features about steady state
biological systems. One is that they are in a state of minimum entropy pro-
duction, that is, the system is functioning with the least degree of dissipation
of energy (and materials) thermodynamically possible in a real situation. These
systems also exhibit a high degree of material loop closing. Materials are circu-
lated through a web of interconnection with scavengers located at the bottom
of the food web turning wastes into food. Even long-lived biological systems
eventually succumb to environmental and internal stresses. They are not ideal
models for a concept that implies flourishing forever. Ayres (1989) coined the
term industrial metabolism as the web of flows of energy and material. When
modeling an industrial economy consisting of an interconnected system of
energy, material, and money flows such a system will supply an analytic means
to repair the break in both the economic and environmental sciences. Daly
(1977), and others have stressed the importance of including material flows in
economic flows analysis, noting the fundamental connections of economics to