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Sustainable Industrial Design and Waste Management
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natural resources. Daly (1977), and earlier Georgescu-Roegen (1971), developed
a steady state framework for describing modern economic systems and for
designing policy, invoking basic laws of thermodynamics and ecological sys-
tems behavior as part of the grounding. Expanding the typically sectoral or
firm-level models used by policy analysts and corporate planners to material
and energy flows during the entire life cycles of economic goods, in theory
should reduce the probability of suboptimal solutions and of the appearance of
unintended consequences. To convert part of these ideas into an industrial
design context, a set of design rules has to be established for the innovation of
more environment friendly and sustainable products and services. A few of
these rules were developed by Ehrenfeld (1997):

• Close material loops.
• Use energy in a thermodynamically efficient manner; employ energy
cascades.
• Avoid upsetting the system’s metabolism; eliminate materials or
wastes that upset living or inanimate components of the system.
• Dematerialize; deliver the function with fewer materials.

Industrial ecology as the “normal” science of sustainability (modifying slightly
the phrase) as used by Allenby (1999) promises much in improving the effi-
ciency of humans’ use of the ecosystem. Technological improvements are
not always better in the full sense of sustainability without taking the envi-
ronment into consideration, where zero pollution is a must for industrial
ecology. Cooperation and community are also important parts of the ecolog-
ical metaphor of sustainability. Industrial ecology is the net resultant of
interactions among zero pollution, cleaner production, and life cycle analysis
according to the cradle-to-cradle concept.

3.3 Industrial Ecology Barriers
Even the industrial ecology concept has a lot of advantages from economi-
cal, environmental, and social points of view; there are still some barriers for
implementation. The barriers to industrial ecology fall into five categories
(Wernick and Ausubel, 1997) namely technical, market and information,
business and financial, regulatory and regional strategies.

Technical barriers
Technical issues are one of the main challenges for industrial ecology to
approach a cradle-to-cradle concept. It requires a lot of innovation to convert
waste into money or prevent it at the source. Overcoming the technical barri-
ers associated with recovering materials from waste streams is necessary but
an insufficient step for stimulating the greater use of wastes in the economy.