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Sustainable Industrial Design and Waste Management
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cradle-to-cradle concept promotes sustainable development in a wider
approach. It is a system of thinking based on the belief that human endeav-
ors can emulate nature’s elegant system of safe and regenerative productiv-
ity, by transforming industries to sustainable enterprises and eliminating
the concept of waste.

Industrial ecology (IE)
Industrial ecology can be considered as the science of sustainability and
promises much to improve the efficiency of the ecosystem as discussed
above in Chapter 3. Technological improvements are not always better when
considering sustainability without taking the environment into consideration,
where zero pollution is a must for industrial ecology. Cooperation and com-
munity are also important parts of the ecological metaphor of sustainability.
The main tool for industrial ecology is cleaner production, which pro-
vides a framework for identifying the impacts of industries on the environ-
ment and for implementing strategies to reduce these impacts as it involves
studying the interactions and relations between industrial systems and eco-
logical systems. The ultimate goal of IE is to achieve sustainable development
that will eventually lead to achieving compliance with the environmental
regulations aimed at protecting the environment.
Industrial ecology aims at transforming industries to resemble natural
ecosystems where any available source of material or energy is consumed by
some organism. The managerial approach of IE involves analyzing the inter-
action between industry and the environment, through the use of tools such
as life cycle analysis (LCA). The technical approach, on the other hand,
involves implementing new process and product design techniques such as
cleaner production and eco-industrial parks. The interaction of cleaner pro-
duction, eco-industrial parks and life cycle analysis finally leads to indus-
trial ecology. A set of design rules that promote industrial ecology has been
established, the following 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 barriers
Even the industrial ecology concept has a lot of advantages from economical,
environmental, and social points of view, but there are still some barriers to
overcome.