Industrial Ecology

Definition

"Industrial ecology (IE) is the study of industrial systems that operate more like natural ecosystems."

One example in industry includes feeding the waste products from one industry into the other, so that the waste products from one industry can be inputs into another industry and be useful to it.

The Analogy

The field's founding observation is that a mature natural ecosystem has no waste. Every output of one organism is an input to another, and materials cycle rather than flowing one way. Industrial systems, by contrast, are overwhelmingly linear: extract, manufacture, use, discard. Industrial ecology proposes that the linear form is not a necessity but a design choice, and that industrial systems can be reorganised to cycle.

The programme was set out in Robert Frosch and Nicholas Gallopoulos's 1989 Scientific American article "Strategies for Manufacturing," which asked why an industrial system could not work like a biological one, and gave the field its founding question.

Key Concepts

• Industrial symbiosis. The exchange arrangement in the definition above: physically linking firms so that one's by-product is another's feedstock. The canonical case is Kalundborg in Denmark, where a power station, a refinery, a pharmaceutical plant, a plasterboard maker and the municipality have exchanged steam, gypsum, fly ash, sludge and cooling water since the 1970s — an arrangement that emerged from bilateral commercial deals rather than from a plan, which is itself a finding.
• Material flow analysis. Tracking materials through an economy in physical rather than monetary units, which reveals that a substantial fraction of extracted material never enters a product at all.
• Life cycle assessment (LCA). The standard method: accounting for environmental burdens across a product's whole life, from extraction to disposal. LCA is where most claims about which option is "greener" are either substantiated or shown to depend on assumptions.
• The circular economy. The policy vocabulary that grew out of industrial ecology, adding the design and business-model side — durability, repair, remanufacture, product-as-service.
• Cradle to Cradle. McDonough and Braungart's 2002 argument that recycling as practised is mostly "downcycling," and that materials should be designed from the start to circulate in either biological or technical cycles.

Limits

Two objections are worth stating. Symbiosis creates dependency: a firm whose feedstock is another firm's by-product is exposed when that firm changes process or closes, which is why Kalundborg-style networks are rarer than the enthusiasm for them suggests. And efficiency gains are subject to rebound — the Jevons effect — in which cheaper material throughput increases total consumption, so that a more efficient system can have a larger absolute footprint.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Electronics are the hardest case for industrial ecology and the most relevant one here. A device combines dozens of elements in quantities too small and too tightly bonded to recover economically; the fastest-failing component is frequently glued in; and the design decisions that determine whether an object can be repaired, disassembled or recovered are made years earlier by people with no interest in the outcome.

This is the material substrate of future runoff. A device discarded while still functional is an industrial ecology problem before it is a consumer one, and the questions under materials — replaceable battery, openable case, separable materials, repairability — are the point where this field and that one meet.

Related Reading

• Materials
• Natural Material
• Future Runoff
• Hand Me Up Technology
• Cultural Resource Management
• Gordon Moore