Strategies and Ecosystem View for Industrial Sustainability

Abstract

Industrial sustainability is a rapidly developing field of research. Numerous industrial examples show that it is possible to decouple economic performance and environmental degradation using the waste and energy hierarchies, but they are not applied systematically. This paper reviews approaches and strategies for industrial sustainability which has been synthesised by the authors into an improvement hierarchy (action framework). By adopting an ecosystem view (thinking framework), these strategies applied at various levels can provide guidance to create sustainable industrial systems. Resource flows within, in and out of a given system are represented using a conceptual ecosystem model. Because “less bad is not good enough”, a novel industrial ecosystem model is proposed based on the principles of circular economy, i.e. industrial ecology and cradle-to-cradle, to promote positive environmental impact and natural capital regeneration as an ideal model for future industrial systems. The model change can be explained and guided by the improvement hierarchy applied at global level to connect the action and thinking frameworks, thereby contributing to lessen the barriers for practitioners to adopt and implement industrial ecology and cradle-to-cradle concepts.