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he topic of industrial ecology, advertised as "the science of sustainability", burst onto the scene early in this decade. Robert Frosch and Nicholas Gallopoulos of General Motors Research Laboratories (i) described the attractive, if somewhat fuzzy concept, as an "industrial ecosystem, analogous in its functioning to a community of biological organisms and their environment" They further observed: "In the industrial jcosystem, each process and network of processes must be viewed as a dependent and interrelated part of a larger whole. The analogy between the industrial ecosystem concept and the biological ecosystem is not perfect, but much could be gained if the industrial system were to mimic the best features of the biological analogue " In an industrial context, the usual interpretation of the biological metaphor has been its use as an intellectual springboard for recycling everything we use in our technological society (see Figure 1). To mat end, scientists and engineers in industry and elsewhere have developed detailed protocols for pollution prevention, design for environment, green chemistry, and allied topics. Many environmentally beneficial actions have been taken as a result, and many more will be. It is less clear, however, whether these steps will achieve (or even approach) the desired aim of sustainability, which will require much more than a modest perturbation of today's technological society. This situation has rendered unclear the goals of industrial ecology and has led to uncertainty as to where the field is ultimately headed. As Valerie Thomas, a research scientist at the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Princeton University, has put it: "If we are successful in doing industrial ecology in the next dec3.de or so, whs.t will we have done?"
T
The
Evolution of Industrial Ecology No longer focusing solely on technology, industrial ecology is beginning to address sustainability through metadisciplinary partnerships. THOMAS E. GRAEDEL
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Assessing the present There are many signs that industry, after a long history of ignoring or despoiling the environment, is beginning to internalize a culture that promotes environmentally oriented corporate behavior. Early in this decade, EPA's 33/50 Program, in which corporations agreed to decrease emissions of 17 toxic chemicals by 33% in three years and by 50% in five, attracted more than 1000 participants. EPA's Green Lights Program, in which universities, government offices, and corporations of all kinds install efficient fluorescent lighting to save energy, has more than 2000 organizational participants, and in 1996, it saved an estimated 3.4 billion kilowatt-hours of © 2000 American Chemical Society
electricity, enough to power a medium-sized U.S. city for a month. These programs were successful because they combined improved environmental performance with positive financial benefits. In recent years, the principles of the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies—essentially statements of ethical and environmentally sensitive perspectives and actions—have been endorsed by more than 60 major corporations (2). Most recently, ISO 14000, an international standard for corporate environmental performance, has been established, and nearly 8000 environmentally responsible corporate organizations worldwide have already been certified see www.sss..sol400.com/ certified.html (3). Industrial ecologists have employed an arsenal of tools and techniques to assist organizations in this transition to increased environmental responsibility. This involves defining and implementing programs for corporate environmental management, industrial design, energy minimization, and corporate environmental metrics. Engineering applications are clearly a focus of many of these efforts. In the environmental sciences, there are encouraging trends as well. Although local impacts are not being ignored, there is increasing emphasis on global issues such as biodiversity, resource sustainability, and climate change. Pastoral environmental regions remain active areas for study, but we begin to see a shift toward the examination of the interplay between dynamic urban regions and the natural world that will influence the environment of the 21st century so dramatically. Also, the fragmented analytical approach in which air quality, water quality, and solid waste are addressed separately is slowly yielding to programs in which the environment is being treated as a system In contrast to these positive signs, there is growing evidence that the overall health of the planet continues to deteriorate: Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases apace; land is being paved at unprecedented rates; and more and more species are becoming extinct. David Orr, professor of environmental studies at Oberlin College in Ohio, uses as an analogy a southbound train carrying the world along toward obvious and debilitating unsustainability. On the train are passengers labeled industrial ecologists who are walking north through the cars. They make significant northward progress as they modify product packaging here and decrease the flow of a waste stream there, but they and the rest of the train are still headed south much faster than the passengers are walking north How might we reverse the train's direction?
FIGURE 1
Schematics of natural and industrial ecosystems A "Type I" ecosystem is one in which resources flow in only one direction from reservoir to use and to disposal las was the case wiih early life on Earth and with human activities during the Industrial Revolution). "Type III systems, shown here for a natural ecosystem (top) and an industrial ecosystem (bottom), acquire most of their resources by reuse rather than from virgin stocks. In a "Type III" system, achieved in nature but not approached in human society, all lesources except solar energy yre recycled over varying periods of time, some very long.
Industrial ecology space-time The planetary environment, like few other tilings in most people's lives, encourages us to think from the perspective of a very wide range of temporal and spatial scales. In the same way, industrial ecologists, responding to the spectrum of environmental concerns, address themselves to issues at diverse JANUARY 1, 2000/ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY / NEWS " 2 9 A
FIGURE 2
Industrial ecology space-time A graphical representation of industrial ecology space-time (IEST) and the loci of the approaches of industrial ecology suggeststhe positional relationships of various system approaches. The issues that are addressed in the metadisciplinary approach are orders of magnitude larger in space and time than those addressed in pollution prevention.
locations throughout what we might term "industrial ecology space-time" (IEST) (see Figure 2). It is not atypical to see industrial ecologists simultaneously discussing 5% decreases in the volume of small-product packaging (a topic short in time, small in space), assessing the mass of materials in landfills (a topic intermediate in both time and space), and estimating the potential for sequestration of carbon dioxide in the oceans (a topic addressing long time periods and the broadest of spatial scales). Some industrial ecologists "live" at the lower left corner of industrial ecology space-time—those concentrating on pollution prevention. Such activities are largely dedicated to tidying up today's industrial processes. Although some might claim that pollution prevention is not legitimately part of industrial ecology, it certainly contributes to industrial ecology's goals. Nonetheless, it is clearly focused on a single life stage of an individual process, and the thinking remains within the facility boundaries. One notch broader in IEST is the first true phase of industrial ecology, which can be termed the technological approach. The activities in this region of the diagram address change within constraints: They emphasize environmentally monitored transformations—sometimes very clever and innovative ones—of products or processes common to the industrial system. This activity has come to be termed "design for environment" (4). Examples include the minimization of energy needed to perform a specific function; dematerialization (using less material while accomplishing the same function); increased modularity as a route to decreased rates of product obsolescence; precision agriculture (in which technology enables more efficient use of seeds fertilizers and herbicides); and paclcaging re~ design to minimize waste A • JANUARY 1, 2000 / ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY / NEWS
Industrial ecology's technological approaches have been indisputably beneficial. Just as clearly, they have not involved societal change, having been played out entirely within the technological arena. Nor have they really asked much of environmental science, since many of its actions have seemed so obviously salutary. It is clear, however, that technology alone will be insufficient for satisfactory progress. Thus, we begin to see the rise of a broader, more foresighted approach in which technologists are interacting with other specialists in relevant fields of the natural and social sciences. One example is efforts to design "green buildings"—structures that minimize energy and water use, promote adaptability, enable upgrades, and think ahead to eventual re-use (5). Technology clearly plays a central role here, but culture, societal preference, and regulatory structures are important as well, since green buildings must be attractive to live in and appealing to prospective buyers. A second example of this interdisciplinary approach is "extended producer responsibility" (EPR) (6), in which the manufacturer of a product is responsible for it from its birth to its death, perhaps through some sort of leasing arrangement. EPR clearly encourages technological improvement, as manufacturers who know they will recover die products have more incentive to make them easy to refurbish, easy to update, and easy to recycle. (The Xerox Corporation is a model for accepting and profiting by this approach.) EPR is not solely technological; it involves marketing changes and cultural adaptation to leasing rather than owning, and it may become a creature of the policy community as well. A third example is the "eco-industrial park", in which a number of industrial activities are colocated so that the byproducts and residues of one activity can become the feedstocks for another (7). In the most famous and best integrated exemplification of such an approach, industries in Kalundborg, Denmark, share heat, power, gypsum, and other resources. Technological efforts are central to the ecoindustrial park vision, of course, but corporate sociology and regulatory accommodation are crucial as well (8). Metadisciplinarity in industrial ecology In the coming decades, industrial ecology is likely to migrate toward larger, broader-scale topics—the upper right corner of IEST (see Figure 2). As it does so, it will increasingly be called upon to face squarely the issue of sustainability—to help determine not "how to do it better", but "how much is too much". The complexities here are legion, but useful perspective is provided by the "master equation" (9), in which our society's overall environmental interaction is conceptually expressed as the product of three terms: Global environmental impact = (Environmental impact/unit of resource) x (Population) x (Resource use/person) The first term in the master equation is purely technological. Substantial improvement has been made in this "technological capacity" term, and much
more will occur in the future. It has been suggested that a factor-of-10 improvement in environmental efficiency is a plausible expectation over the next few decades. The second term in the master equation, the global population, is expected to approximately double over the next half-century. This leaves the third term, the "quality of life" term, as needing to increase, on global average, by substantially less than a factor of 5 if today's overall environmental impacts are to be decreased. The task is daunting, because the developed countries show little tendency to modify their materials-intensive lifestyle, while developing countries are hurrying to match it. Nonetheless, it is this term in the master equation that must increasingly be addressed, and it is clear that dolus so requires a modification of the "more is better" values of society and culture
FIGURE 3 The metadisciplinarity approach framework A schematic framework for metadisciplinarity, in which knowledge from scientific, technological, social, and economic fields is synthesized in a focus on global sustainability and the human prospect Locattons Dxindicate specific intellectual disciplines; the dashed lines between them represent interactions between the knowledge bases of two disciplines. As one moves further up trie meiadisciplinary vector, the reduction in circumference of the usable knowledge circle suggests improved integration of information.
Stimulating transformation The industrial ecology future that might be envisioned is thus one in which the locus of action moves from the current, largely technological, phase through the transition phase and into a metadisciplinarity approach (see Figure 3). Where present efforts tend to be concentrated in specific disciplines, industrial ecologists who move intellectually up the metadisciplinary vector will be gathering relevant information from a number of disciplines and choosing the most useful data, tools, and approaches for the accomplishment of specific purposes (10). In this latter phase, the industrial ecologist must work in cooperation with many other practitioners to achieve the desired ends, not only incorporating knowledge from their specialties, but understanding enough about those specialties to appreciate when that knowledge can best be used. Industrial ecology will not be the central discipline in these efforts, but rather one of the core disciplines of a broader community of "sustainability specialists". On the distant horizon is a future in which progress may be measured not by technological change, nor by societal change, but by technology working explicitly for and in concert with other segments of society to achieve common goals. In this connection, a vision of this societal ecology can be proposed: the science of planetary stewardship, involving the practice of intelligent oversight of the planet as it undergoes natural and anthropogenically driven variability. The definition recognizes that stasis is not the goal of sustainability, but rather that we will need as a society to understand and deal with variability of all kinds, whether caused by ourselves or by natural forces, whether on short or long spa~ tial and temporal scales. We also need to realize that our present approach to the use of resources of all kinds will require modification and that activities involving the use of materials and enersv must be un~ dertaken with increased attention to their longerterm consequences This vision of intelligent oversight will require collegial leaders with broad perspectives as well as the full participation of governments It is a daunting challenge but it is Drohablv the only way by which there are anv real nrosnects for reaching true glnhal sustainabilitv
Acknowledgments I am grateful to Marian Chertow, Miriam Heller, John Hermanson, Reid Lifset, Robert Socolow, and Valerie Thomas for helpful comments, and to Hideki Koizumi for devising an earlier version of Figure 3.
References (1) Frosch, R. A.; Gallopoulos, N. Toward an Industrial Ecology. In The Treatment and Handling of Wastes; Bradshaw, A. D., Southwood, R., Warner, E, Eds.; Chapman and Hall: London, 1991; Chapter 16. (2) Reaching Critical Mass: A Strategic Plan for CERES; Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies: Boston, MA, 1996. (3) ISO 14001 Registered and Certified Companies. www.isol4000.com/certified.html (accessed Oct. 1999). (4) Graedel, T. E. Design for Environment; Prentice Hall: New York, 1996. (5) Wilson, A.; Uncapher, J. L.; McManigal, L.; Lovins, L. H.; Cureton, M.; Browning, W. D. Green Development: Integrating Ecology and Real Estate; lohn Wiiey: New York, 1998. (6) Framework Report, Phase 2: Extended and Shared Producer Responsibility; ENV/EPOC/PPC(97)20/REV2; Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development: Paris, 1998. (7) Ehrenfeld, J.; Gertler, N.J. Ind. Ecol. 1997,1 (1), 67-79. (8) Chertow, M. /. Ind. Ecol. 1999, 2 (3), 8-10. (9) Dietz, X; Rosa, E. Human Ecol. Rev. 1994, 1 (Summer/ Autumn), 277-300. (10) Linking Industrial Ecology to Public Policy—Report of a Workshop; Andrews, C, Rejeski, D., Socolow, R., Thomas, V, Eds.; Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, Princeton University: Princeton, NJ, 1998.
Thomas E. Graedel is a professor of industrial ecology, chemical engineering, and geophysics in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. JANUARY 1, 2000/ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY / NEWS • 3 1 A
