Industrial Ecology’s First Decade

Abstract

Industrial ecology can be said to have begun with a 1989 seminal publication entitled "Strategies for Manufacturing." During the next decade, the fi eld was initially defi ned and developed by researchers in industry and elsewhere who saw the opportunity for improving corporate and governmental performance related to the environment and sustainability. They introduced design for environment, industrial symbiosis, and resource use and loss assessments at national and global levels and enhanced the embryonic specialty of life-cycle assessment. In the same decade, industrial ecology became widely recognized as a scholarly specialty, with its own journals and conferences. This chapter reviews industrial ecology's emergence and evolution, largely from a North American perspective, with emphasis on the fi eld's lesser-known fi rst decade.

Material Flow Accounting: Measuring Global Material Use for Sustainable Development

“…In-use stocks: materials that have accumulated in buildings, infrastructures, and durable goods (manufactured capital) originates from the works of Robert U. Ayres (23). In 1969, Ayres & Kneese (24) introduced a material balance approach that was revolutionary in environmental and economic thinking at that time (25). They argued that the economy is at odds with the first law of thermodynamics, that materials cannot be "consumed" and that to reduce wastes and emissions a reduction in material inputs would be required.…”

Mimicking natural ecosystems to develop sustainable supply chains: A theory of socio-ecological intergradation

“…The importance of applying knowledge from biological systems to organizations (even though not explicitly applied to supply chains) is not new (e.g., Von Bertalanffy and Woodger, 1934). Specifically, the modeling of organizational processes on those observed within natural ecosystemsda field called industrial ecologydhas provided a conceptual source for the sustainable development of businesses since the late 1980s (Ayres and Ayres, 2002;Ehrenfeld, 2004;Frosch and Gallopoulos, 1989;Graedel and Lifset, 2016;Sarkis, 2003).…”

Analogical reasoning guidelines: a review and application to sustainable supply chains

“…Natural (biological) ecosystems have been shown to hold theoretical value through the creation of nature-inclusive analogies (Ehrenfeld, 2004; Korhonen, 2001). This approach is aligned with industrial ecology (Frosch and Gallopoulos, 1989; Graedel and Lifset, 2016; Sarkis, 2003), which is a “systems-based, multidisciplinary discourse that seeks to understand emergent behavior of complex integrated human [including supply chain] and natural systems” (Allenby, 2006, p. 33). Shallow lakes in particular have been identified as a useful analogy for many man-made ecological problems (Mäler et al , 2004), including those pertaining to supply chain operations.…”