Book Review

INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY: Two NEW BOOKS

John R. Ehrenfeld is Senior Research Associate in the MIT Center for Technology, Policyl and Industrial Development and has additional appointments as Senior Lecturer in the interdepamental Technology and Policy Program and in the Departments of Chemical Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering. A t MIT since 1985, he directs the MIT Program on Technotogy, Business, and Environment, an interdisciplinary educational, research, and policy program. He directs an ongoing research project examining the way businesses manage environmental concerns, seeking organizational and technological changes to improve their practices.

John R. EhrenfeZd

ndustrial ecology is an emerging idea that encompasses many of the themes that have been written about in Total Qztality Environ- rnentulMunugernent. Two new books on this subject hit the street at

virtually the same time, an odd coincidence in such a brand-new domain of environmental thinking. Industrial Ecology, by T.E. Graedel and B. R. Allenby (Prentice-Hall, 1995) is written primarily for practitio- ners and students, but serves to define the concepts and methods available for the practice of industrial ecology. The other book, Indus- trial EcoZogy and Global Change, edited by R. Socolow, C . Andrews, F. Berkout, and V. Thomas (Cambridge University Press, 1995) contains a series of papers originally presented at the 1992 Global Change Institute Conference on Industrial Ecology and Global Change. The editors have done an excellent job to convert what is, in other circumstances, an often disconnected set of conference proceedings into a well-integrated and timely book that provides a broad context for industrial ecology. Taken together, the two provide a thorough grounding in this emerging field.

Industrial Ecology Industrial ecology is, first of all, a metaphor. As is almost always the

case, the first encounter with the world under new circumstances-in this case, sustainability-shows up through old metaphors as human consciousness can only interpret the new through the filters of the old. One obvious image is that of the living global ecological system. Another is that of the industrial basis of modern economies. Industrial ecology attempts to merge the two as a means for understanding and for restructuring industry toward a more sustainable set of practices.

There are many different faces of industrial ecology. As Andrews et al. say in the end piece of Socolow, “[industrial ecology] is analytical, critical, and prescriptive.” The analytic side captures the systems view of the flows of materials and energy through large economic systems. This face opposes the microscopically focused categories of most regu- latory frameworks used historically to manage specific environmental problems. The global-scale modeling approach reflects the rooting of the Socolow et al. book in industrial metabolism, an earlier approach concentrating on tracing flows of materials through economies. The

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metabolism metaphor serves well to push human analysts to make the connections between our activities and the ecological context in which they are fundamentally imbedded. The importance of the product, rather than the process, emerges as an important integrating analytic theme in industrial ecology.

The critical side of industrial ecology forces the same analysts and others to expand their consciousness of the world beyond the fence line, the present and near-term future, and the man-made political bound- aries which are invisible to nature and have confounded the way we think about our impacts on large-scale natural systems. The notion of industrial ecology has the power to overcome the hubris and blindness that have followed the modern notion of technological progress as inevitable and fundamentally positive in human social terms. Central notions like inexhaustibility, materials circularity, and robustness re- place those such as growth, technological substitution, and Malthusian skepticism that belong to the modernist, neo-classical economic model. In keeping with the critical role of industrial ecology, both books point out the importance of understanding the origins of the present indus- trial/economic structures that characterize modernity and provide an introduction to the industrialization processes of the West.

Graedel and Allenby Graedel and Allenby divide their book into five main sections. The

first establishes the authors’ definition of industrial ecology and sets the stage via a historical journey through the development of modern industrial society and an associated set of environmental problems, including global issues-climate change, ozone depletion, biodiversity and loss of habitat-regional issues, and local-scale concerns. The discussions are grounded in science, but are accessible to the nonscien- tist reader. This section is followed by several chapters that connect industrial activity to social wants and needs and to standard regulatory and economic theory. The authors develop a broad normative position (sustainable) for industrial ecology, placing it between the unsustainable status quo and the more radical deep ecology systems that would require substantial readjustments in the economic and technologic dimensions of society.

The book then moves to a more practical section focused on understanding and analyzing natural and industrial life cycles. Through comparisons with an evolutionary model of ecosystem development, industrial systems are shown to be in an early, linear stage where materials and energy flow through an economy in a once-through, dissipative manner, rather than in the circular, conservative process characteristic of highly evolved ecosystems.

The main section of the book presents a series of chapters on Design for Environment, a way of turning the life-cycle assessments of products and processes into environmentally improved technologies. Materials substitution, pollution prevention, energy conservation, and other approaches to minimize life-cycle impacts on the environmental serve

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BOOK REVIEW

as a basis for understanding and implementing change in many industrial venues. The book closes with a section on organizational aspects of implementing industrial ecology and a few visionary thoughts on transformative technologies and economic arrangements for the next century. The book briefly describes natural cycles and develops the concept of LCAs and a handful of methodologies to carry out such assessments, making this book useful both as a text for students and as a guidebook for practitioners.

Socolow e t al. Socolow et al. is divided along similar lines, but with considerably

different emphasis among the sections. It, too, begins with a historical discussion of the emergence of patterns of industrial production in both developed and developing countries. It is organized more from an ecological standpoint, rather than from an industrial one. The intro- duction sets the stage for what follows by suggesting six themes of industrial ecology: long-term habitability, global scope, the overwhelm- ing of natural systems by human enterprise, vulnerability, mass-flow analysis, and the centrality of the firm and the farm. The first four of these categories raise one’s consciousness of the critical dimensions of human impacts on the natural systems that surround and nurture human settlements of all stages of development and size. The latter two begin to focus more on the human economy and on the way that the production of goods and services is arranged.

The two books are interestingly intertwined, with Graedel writing the chapter defining industrial ecology in the Socolow text. The introductory section, entitled “Vulnerability and Adaptation,” is fol- lowed by chapters that lead the reader to a sense of increasing conscious- ness of the vulnerability of both the natural and human sides of the ecological accounts ledger.

The next section, entitled somewhat boldly as “The Grand Cycles: Disruption and Repair,” addresses several of the major areas of current environmental concern with a focus on energy and global warming. This section is followed by a similar examination of toxics and the environment, looking at both human and, particularly, ecotoxicity. The results of a detailed assessment of metals emissions in the Rhine serve to demonstrate the power of a systematic framework for analysis. The final two sections make connections between problems posed by the intersection of anthropogenic and natural processes with industrial activities in firms.

An interesting chapter in Socolow et al. on “Prioritizing Impacts in Industrial Ecology,” introduces risk assessment as an imperfect means for this job and offers some alternatives to the more conventional risk assessment procedures. The last major section contains chapters on the policy framework from the perspective of both developed and develop- ing nations, One chapter on “Policies to Encourage Clean Technology” organizes policy options for firms along several axes and points to fundamental differences in the regulatory policies of those countries

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with the most highly developed regulatory systems. The United States, for example, has an open, but rigid system in contrast to the United Kingdom with a closed and flexible framework. Another chapter draw- ing on experience in India notes the different nature of experience in countries where markets and institutions are not so well developed as in the industrialized nations. The chapter author’s comments are particularly relevant in a text on industrial ecology with its central tie to the firm and to market mechanisms. The power of this new paradig- matic environmental framework to address global problems‘ may be severely limited by institutional differences among countries.

This book, like Graedel and Allenby’s, ends with a forward- looking chapter and a few caveats and limitations to the industrial ecology metaphor. The reader should not fail to read this chapter even while skipping over others in the book. Ecosystems and human economies are not the same. Ecosystems do not always act in the sustainable manner. Both books end on a note that, although the focus of industrial ecology is on production and industrial activities, patterns of consumption must change if human and ecological patterns are to be brought into congruence. Technology can do wonders but may not be able to create such improvements in efficiency of energy and materials use to overcome demands created by population growth and increasing affluence.

Conclusions Many of the same topics are covered in the two books. For example,

both discuss life-cycle management of products, design for environ- ment, pollution prevention, and so on, although Socolow et al. is more general in its treatment of these subjects. Both use and articulate the idea of global or ecosystem cycling and of the impact of human outputs on the stability of natural cyclical processes. Each presents a somewhat different, but interrelated set of predictions and policies for the next century. Graedel and Allenby’s definition of dematerialization, that is “the process by which lesser amounts of materials are used to make products that perform the same functions as their predecessors,” corre- sponds to several of the six categories of industrial ecology framed by Socolow. Transformative technologies that substitute information and intellectual capital for materials will have to be brought into widespread use in the next century, Graedel and Allenby argue. Both books aim to turn the reader’s attention and that of the larger community away from a myopic environmental focus on the past and present to a broader, systems-based perspective of the future. The concerns are grounded in discussions of the systemic nature of environmental degradation and resource demands. A comparison of global carbon and nitrogen cycles suggests the current attention being given to carbon and to global warming may divert attention away from disruptions in other impor- tant biological and geo-chemical systems. The modeling process can serve as a methodology for readers to construct similar systems that will point to the significance of human activities.

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If one looks for places to be critical, both books attempt, perhaps, to cover too much ground. The range of topics is a bit mind-boggling to any single reader who must wade through discussions that presume relatively well-formed scientific knowledge in biology and earth sci- ences, materials sciences, process and product engineering, corporate organization and management practices, environmental policy, and more. However, in a field that is un-selfconsciously multidisciplined and systems-based, such dither is unavoidable. It merely suggests that these two books will undoubtedly spawn many more that are focused more closely on singular aspects of the notions raised so evocatively in these two ground-breaking texts. They offer two routes to academics- one, the Socolow et al. text for the generalist or more philosophically inclined, and the Graedel and Allenby text for the more practically oriented. +

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