Concepts and Methodologies to Help Promote Industrial Ecology

To help promote ecologically sustainable development (ESD), industrial ecology (IE) has emerged as a framework for proactive management of human impacts on the natural environment. IE focuses on borrowing natural ecological principles and applying them to the design and management of commercial systems, and the infrastructure required by them. IE principles can be relevant to the workings of both the private and public sectors, and have the potential to be applied to internal processes within a single enterprise and interactions between a network of enterprises. As a concept, IE is finding favor at a time when traditional depollution approaches which rely on end-of-pipe solutions are increasingly being regarded as inefficient (Erkman, 1997), and it has been defined as:The philosophical underpinning of IE is the shift away from a reactive approach to environmental problems, in particular the “polluter pays principle” where organizations are penalized for a transgression of environmental legislation and governments (both local and state) are burdened with the heavy cost of regulation. IE does not accept the view that industry and environment are irrevocably opposed, but takes the position that pollutant waste generation results from process inefficiencies that reflect a loss of profitability (although this is not always perceived as such by orthodox corporate accounting practice).