Industrial ecology and the boundaries of the manufacturing firm

Abstract

Summary Decisions on organizational boundaries are critical aspects of manufacturing firms’ business strategies. This article brings together concepts and findings from industrial ecology and business strategy in order to understand how manufacturing firms engage in initiatives to facilitate recycling of process wastes. Based on a distinction between waste recovery and use of the recovered resources, the article introduces a typology of four different strategies: Closed, Outsourcing, Diversification, and Open. Each strategy has a unique set of organizational boundaries and is associated with different motives and benefits for the manufacturing firm. The typology of strategies provides a conceptual contribution to assist industrial managers in strategic decision‐making, and to support further studies on organizational boundaries in industrial ecology research.

Circular value creation architectures: Make, ally, buy, or laissez‐faire

“…Consequently, the CE requires additional coordination efforts in the up‐ and downstream value chains (Boons, 2002; Esty & Porter, 1998; Sharfman, Ellington, & Meo, 1997). While industrial symbiosis provides insights into inter‐firm coordination for (waste) material circularity during production (Chertow & Ehrenfeld, 2012; Magnusson, Andersson, & Ottosson, 2019; Prosman, Waehrens, & Liotta, 2017) and closed‐loop supply chain literature provides insights into remanufacturing (Guide & van Wassenhove, 2009; Savaskan, Bhattacharya, & van Wassenhove, 2004), there is little research on coordination for holistic product circularity (Hopkinson, Zils, Hawkins, & Roper, 2018; Revellio & Hansen, 2017; Toffel, 2003).…”

Sustainability Solutions : Lessons on Assessment and Facilitation

“…As such, it can prove difficult to generalise the results and improve upon disciplinary theories. If such general insights are put forth, it is often due to insights gained from combining theories from traditionally separate fields, for example, business models and industrial ecology (Short et al, 2014), organisational theory and industrial ecology (Magnusson et al, 2019) and theories of the firm and corporate sustainability (Lozano et al, 2015). This dependency on case-specific results could be part of the reason why transdisciplinary science often has trouble generating high scientific impact in bibliometric terms, a challenge noted by Brandt et al (2013).…”

Winners of the 2019 Graedel Prizes: The Journal of Industrial Ecology Best Paper Prizes

“…These five, in alphabetical order, were: a "big picture" examination of infrastructure from a complex adaptive systems perspective in relation to changes to the Anthropocene (Chester, Markolf, & Allenby, 2019); a detailed, bottom‐up analysis of consumption‐induced impacts of Swiss households, employing machine learning techniques (Froemelt, Buffat, & Hellweg, 2019); an assessment of circularity in the European Union (EU) economy using economy‐wide material flow accounting integrated with waste flows, recycling, and downcycled materials (Mayer et al., 2019); a practical paper on generalized data structures for industrial ecology, including taxonomy and implementation (Pauliuk, Heeren, Hasan, & Müller, 2019); and an assessment of the potential environmental impacts of future global metal extraction, to 2050, using lifecycle‐based methodology (Van der Voet, Van Oers, Verboon, & Kuipers, 2019). Two excellent papers on the positive impacts of environmental disclosures (Hora & Subramanian, 2019) and a typology for defining boundaries for recycling by manufacturing firms (Magnusson, Andersson, & Ottosson, 2019) completed the seven nominations.…”

“…nian, 2019) and a typology for defining boundaries for recycling by manufacturing firms (Magnusson, Andersson, & Ottosson, 2019) completed the seven nominations.…”