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Industrial Ecology

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Abstract

There are several issues which are debatable in Industrial Ecology (IE): its definition, its status as a science or not, as a normative field or not, whether it is related to sustainability or not, whether they are mutualistic or cooperative relationships, etc. In 1989, year which are the point of departure for IE, Robert Frosch and Nicholas Gallopoulos) published in Scientific American the article “Strategies for Manufacturing. Waste from one industrial process can serve as the raw material for another, thereby reducing the impact of industry on the environment”, in which they defend the creation of productive systems which function as natural systems do. However, IE has not become the “science of sustainability” as Allenby stated (1999: 40). Instead of taking into account such a broad endeavour, IE has only been working on two fields: Material Flow Accounting and Industrial Symbiosis or Industrial Ecosystems. During the last two decades there has been great progress in learning about the metabolic processes of many societies. This knowledge is vital to move them towards sustainability, because we can comprehend the material and energy flows of the societies, due to the diverse economic activities, how these flows move across the economic system, and how they are transformed and treated at the end of their life. In the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century there were strong symbiotic exchanges between various industries (in particular the meat industry provided others with waste which was raw material for them). After this period these symbiotic relations declined sharply, but at the end of the past century, a new process of recovery began and an extraordinary range of experiences have been developed.

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This chapter is dedicated to analysing the concept of Industrial Ecology (IE), and its two main fields: Material Flow Accounting and Industrial Symbiosis (IS).

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Bermejo, R. (2014). Industrial Ecology. In: Handbook for a Sustainable Economy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8981-3_17

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