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Sustainable Development and Industrial Ecology
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the unique character of different regions this work could proceed in the form
of case studies of regions containing a concentration of industries in a par-
ticular sector.

3.4 Eco-Industrial Parks
As noted in Chapter 2 from the definition of cleaner production, there are
three stages during the life cycle of any item for consumption. Evans and
Stevenson (2000) have illustrated these three stages as follows:

• Production processes: Conserving raw materials and energy, elimi-
nating toxic raw materials, and reducing the quantity and toxicity of
all emissions and wastes.
• Products: Reducing negative impacts along the life cycle of a product.
• Services: Incorporating environmental concerns into designing and
delivering services.

Brewster (2001) has implied from the cleaner production definition that CP
focuses only on individual activities or a single production process rather
than focusing on the environmental impacts of the entire range of industrial
activity. With the evolvement of CP, many decision makers, scientists, and
engineers begin to break our dependence on single use of the finite natural
sources that will lead to the ultimate depletion of these sources. As an alter-
native, biological ecosystems should be our model guidance to establish the
industrial system with no “waste” but only residual materials that could be
consumed by another process in the same industry or a different one. This
preceding recognition is the main concept for the industrial ecology as
explained before. Therefore industrial ecology seeks strategies to increase
eco-efficiency and protect the environment by minimizing the environmen-
tal impacts to be within the allowable limits. In other words, industrial ecol-
ogy seeks to move our industrial and economic systems toward a similar
relationship with the Earth’s natural systems or “artificial ecology”. IE seeks
to discover how industrial processes can become part of an essentially closed
cycle of resource use and reuse in concert with the natural environmental
systems in which we live. There are some similarities between IE and CP,
but CP puts more emphasis on the sustainability of industrial practices over
time and more frequently looks beyond individual firms and their existing
processes, products, and services.
One of the most important goals of industrial ecology (Frosch, 1994) –
making one industry’s waste another’s raw materials – can be accomplished
in different ways. The most ideal way for IE is the eco-industrial park (EIP).
These are industrial facilities clustered to minimize both energy and material
wastes through the internal bartering and external sales of wastes. Robert
Frosch – an executive at General Motors – put the question in 1989 “Why