Encyclopedia of Environmental Science and Engineering, Volume I and II

504 INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY

transformation were called out in the third quarter of the

twentieth century by several seminal environmental thinkers

(Carson, 1962; Lovelock, 1988; Ward et al., 1972). The pub-

lication of the Club of Rome’s report The Limits to Growth

also received considerable public attention (Meadows et al.,

1972). That report predicted that economic growth could not

continue indefinitely because of Earth’s limited availability

of natural resources, as well as its limited capacity to assimi-

late pollution of various types. Most of the Club of Rome’s

dire projections about resource exhaustion have not thus far

come to pass. Nonetheless, the issue of the sustainability of

human civilization has become a concern of global scope

and reach.

The concept of industrial ecology, in which the

technology–environmental linkage is explicitly recognized

and addressed, can be traced to the early 1920s (Erkman,

1997, 2002). However, 1989 is generally viewed as the

formal year of birth of the field (Figure 2). In that year, R.

Frosch, then vice president of the General Motors Research

Laboratories, and his colleague N. Gallopoulos developed

the concept of industrial ecosystems in their seminal article

“Strategies for Manufacturing” (Frosch and Gallopoulos,

1989). Their view was that an ideal industrial system would

function in a way analogous to its biological counterparts.

In such an industrial ecosystem, the waste produced by one

process would be used as a resource for another process. No

waste would therefore be emitted from the system, and the

negative impacts to the natural environment would be mini-

mized or eliminated. This analogy between biological and

industrial systems was the conceptual contribution that led

ultimately to the new field of industrial ecology.

Industrial ecology’s growth since the early 1990s has

been marked by a series of institutional milestones, including

the first textbook ( Industrial Ecology; Graedel and Allenby,

1995), the first university degree program (created by

the Norwegian University of Science and Technology

[NTNU] in 1996), T. E. Graedel’s appointment as the first

professor of industrial ecology in 1997, the birth of the

Journal of Industrial Ecology in 1997, and the founda-

tion of the International Society for Industrial Ecology

(ISIE) in 2001. As a consequence of these activities, an

academic community of industrial ecologists has been

formed, research methodologies are being developed and

refined, and industrial ecology is being practiced all over

the world.

INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY’S TOOLBOX

Given an evolving field with a wide and evolving scope,

industrial ecology’s toolbox has become equipped with a

variety of methods of approaching the concepts and practices

of interest. Three of the most common tools, material-flow

analysis (MFA), life-cycle assessment (LCA), and input-

output analysis (IOA), are discussed below from a method-

ological point of view.

Material-Flow Analysis

MFA is “the systematic assessment of the flows and stocks

of materials within a system defined in space and time. It

connects the sources, the pathways, and the intermediate and

final sinks of a material” (Brunner and Rechberger, 2004,

p. 3), thus providing information on the systemic utilization

of the material within the given boundaries.

(d) Type II industrial ecosystem

Energy & Limited waste

Limited resources

Materials

Extractor

Recycler Customer

Manu-

facturer

FIGURE 1 (continued)

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