Industrial Ecology

Industrial ecology (IE) tracks physical resource flows of industrial and consumer systems at a variety of spatial scales, drawing on environmental and social science, engineering, management, and policy analysis. Prescriptively, IE seeks to reduce environmental impacts and the pressure on natural resources while maintaining function for human well-being, by stressing the importance of production choices to extend the life of embedded materials and energy, emphasizing circular rather than linear flows, and decoupling economic growth from resource use. IE has been described as a “post-modern science” that synthesizes multiple perspectives in theory and problem solving, often simultaneously, as a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary field. The unusual name “industrial ecology” derives from a metaphor with the biological ecosystem and borrows on several fronts, such as its focus on resource cycling, multi-scalar systems, material and energy stocks and flows, and food webs. Over time concepts from other sciences have also been weaved into industrial ecology. The intellectual roots of industrial ecology date back to the 19th century, and some seminal methods were published in the 1960s and 1970s. It took until the early 1990s, however, before a scientific field began to take shape. Since its early days, industrial ecology has become more robust through database development, deeper mathematical modeling, collaboration among natural, physical, and social scientists, and extension of theory on its own and in dialogue with other allied fields. At the same time, industrial ecology increasingly contributes insights to environmental management and policy, on issues ranging from climate change, to biodiversity loss, water, and more. Despite its youth, breadth, and intersection with other disciplines, industrial ecology can lay claim to several subfields as being within its ambit: industrial symbiosis, which studies the exchange of byproducts and sharing of resources among industrial actors; socioeconomic metabolism and material flows analysis, focusing on the stocks and flows of various materials through society; life-cycle assessment, examining the environmental impact of a material, product, or system across its entire life cycle; environmental input-output analysis, broadly focused on the environmental impact of entire sectors of the economy; sustainable urban systems, with focus on metabolism of resources at the urban scale; and resource productivity and circular economy, addressing the effectiveness of resource use while decreasing its impact. In addition to these core subfields, other topics are more loosely linked with industrial ecology, including green chemistry, life-cycle engineering, social ecology, design for environment, and ecological economics.