env i ronment

INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY MAKING AN IMPACT The discipline is making inroads in research and industrial arenas, but is just starting to influence public policy

Bette Hileman C&EN Washington

The discipline of industrial ecology is little known, but it is a rapidly emerging field growing by leaps and

bounds. Ten years ago, it literally did not exist. It could claim no professors, no graduate students, and no government grants. Now, there are textbooks, profes­sors, graduate students, federal grants, and a research journal. However, industrial ecology so far has had only minor influ­ences on public policy.

Industrial ecology is a whole new ap­proach to pollution prevention and in­cludes, but is not limited to, design for the environment, life-cycle analysis, and eco-industrial parks. One problem with this broad-based interdisciplinary area is that it is difficult to define and explain.

Robert H. Socolow, a professor in the Center for Energy & Environmental Stud­ies at Princeton University, defines indus­trial ecology as the "science of sustain-ability—the self-conscious organization of production and consumption to re-

Moomaw: rethinking of industrial processes

duce the human consequences of indus­trial activity." A recent workshop held at the White House Council on Environ­mental Quality (CEQ) defined it as a dis­cipline that "takes a systems view of the use and environmental implications of materials, energy, and products in indus­trial societies. . . . It includes analysis of materials flows, and product and materi­al life-cycle management through reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling."

Industrial ecology is an expansion of in­dustrial metabolism, says Suren Erkman, director of the Institute for Communica­tion & Analysis of Science & Technology in Geneva. Industrial metabolism, he ex­plains, aims to understand the circulation of materials and energy in industrial sys­tems from their initial extraction to their "inevitable reintegration" into the overall biogeochemical cycles. He says industrial ecology aims to determine how the indus­trial system can be restructured "to make it compatible with the way natural ecosys­tems function."

"The important contribution of indus­trial ecology is that it forces a rethinking of industrial processes in the context of their environmental impacts both up­stream and downstream from the man­ufacturing stage," says William R. Moo-maw, a professor of international envi­ronmental policy at Tufts University. "It makes clear where the reduction of envi­ronmental impacts can take place most cost-effectively."

One of the best ways to explain indus­trial ecology is by the research that people actually do in the area. David T. Allen, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Texas, Austin, took the linear programs that chemical engineers use to optimize product and minimize cost and added a new objective—to minimize the throughput of chlorine. This allowed him to take an industry-level view of the reduc­tion of chlorinated intermediates. "He did it in a rigorous fashion using tools that the industry people already know," says Reid

J. Iifset, a professor in the Yale University School of Forestry & Environmental Stud­ies and editor of the Journal oflndustnal Ecology.

"Allen's work gives real content to the idea of doing systems analysis for the en­tire chemical manufacturing sector," Lifset explains. "What is important about Allen's research is not the exact numbers he came up with, but that somebody brought a novel perspective to a question that is very polarized." The approach allows ana­lysts to talk in rigorous terms about choic­es with regard to chlorine rather than sim­ply arguing that life on Earth will end if chlorine is used, or the economy will die if it is not used, he says.

Lester B. Lave, a professor of econom­ics at Carnegie Mellon University, took an industrial ecologist's approach to compar­ing lead emissions from electric cars with emissions from leaded gasoline. He found that emissions are at least five times larger from the smelting, manufacture, and re­cycling involved in lead-acid battery-oper­ated electric vehicles than from compara­ble vehicles using leaded gasoline [Sci­ence, 2ββ, 993 (1995)].

Socolow and Valerie M. Thomas of the Center for Energy & Environmental Stud­ies at Princeton did similar research. How­ever, when they analyzed lead emissions, they looked at the form of emissions and their potential impact. Lave assumed the lead loss rate from smelters was 1% a year and that humans are potentially exposed to all of this lost lead. But Socolow and Thomas found that most of that lost lead was in the form of Environmental Protec­tion Agency-regulated slag and that the emissions from smelters that humans are

Lifset: move beyond mere assertions

JULY 20, 1998 C&EN 41

e n v i r o n m e n t ΚΨΨ^

Industrial ecology has a short history Although the concept of industrial ecolo­gy had antecedents in the 1980s, the first major ILS. event in the field was a collo-qnhim sponsored by the National Acade­my ofSciences in 1991. At the conclusion of that meeting, Robert White, dien head of the National Academy of Engineering, decided that industrial ecology could es­tablish a valuable framework the engi­neering community could use to think about environmental issues, and ΝΑΕ held a series of workshops on the topic over the next few years.

Another event that helped launch the field was a meeting in Snowmass Vil­lage, Colo., in 1992 sponsored by Boul­der, Cola-based University Corp. for At­mospheric Research, a consortium of more than 60 universities. This led to a seminal book called "Industrial Ecology and Global Changew (Cambridge Univer­sity Press, 1997), edited by Robert H. So-colow of Princeton University and col· leagues. The first textbook in the field, "Industrial Ecology" by BradenR, Alien-by and Thomas £. Graedel, was pub­lished in 1995 by Prentke-HalL

AT&T also played an important rok in fostering industrial ecology as a disci­pline. In 1992, the AT&T Foundation started a fellowship program to provide seed money to scholars to work in the field. The program has now been mostly taken ova* by the Lucent Technologies Foundation, which supports research in industrial ecology in collaboration with die National Science Foundatioa Howev­er, the AT&T Foundation continues to support some scholars.

A journal in the field was first pub­lished by HOT Press hi 1997. The Journal of Industrial Ecology, which is published quarterly, is edited at Yak University.

Now, a number of universities around the world have faculty members who are called professors of industrial ecolo­gy, and several others offer courses in the subject These include Yale Universi­ty, Massachusetts Institute of Technolo­gy, and the Royal Institute of Technolo­gy in Sweden, This summer, the first Gordon Research Conference on indus­trial ecology was held in New Hamp-shire. It focused on materials flows.

exposed to are one-hundredth of that. They determined that the greatest impacts of lead-acid batteries are the human expo­sures from lead-acid battery recycling op­erations, and then they developed criteria for establishing clean recycling.

The work by these two research groups has established greater clarity about what would constitute clean recy­cling of lead-acid batteries on a life-cycle basis, Lifset says. "It forces all of those in­volved to move beyond mere assertions to specific arguments framed in a systems perspective."

Last year, the National Science Founda­tion, in collaboration with the Lucent Technologies Foundation, began giving fellowships in industrial ecology. For fiscal 1998, they gave 18 awards with a total val­ue of $ 1.2 million. A similar number of fel­lowships will be awarded in fiscal 1999. "It is unusual for NSF to work with private companies to fund research," says Fred Thompson, program director in NSF's Di­vision of Bioengineering & Environmental Systems.

The NSF/Lucent fellowships illustrate the wide range of research that falls under the rubric of industrial ecology. One project seeks to identify how to incorporate the concept of modular units into mechanical design of a product so that the units can be disassembled and recycled or reused at

the end of a product's life. Another is look­ing for a technique to eliminate the unnec­essary flow of chemicals during the pro­cessing of thin films for integrated circuits. A third aims to use models analogous to those for biological systems to investigate the flows of materials, energy, and capital in an industrial ecosystem.

Currently, no federal agencies other than NSF are giving academic grants spe­cifically in industrial ecology. However, EPA may fund two projects in the area in fiscal 1999, says Barbara Karn, program of­ficer in environmental engineering at EPA. "One of my goals in life is to bring indus­trial ecology into the consciousness of EPA," she says. "What EPA is doing prima­rily now is pollution prevention," she says. "For the most part, it is still not looking at total industrial processes."

However, that may change. EPA is convening a workshop this fall to devise ways to make EPA officials more aware of the concept.

Although the federal involvement in in­dustrial ecology on an academic level is rather minimal, some regions are using federal money to implement practical projects in the field. With funds from EPA's Office of Solid Waste, a government planning group called the Triangle J Coun­cil of Governments, Research Triangle Park, N.C., is using a geographic informa­

tion system to map the flows of energy, waste, and materials for a six-county area around Raleigh-Durham, N.C. The group also is working with industries to see how they can use the wastes from some firms as inputs into others. "Once the data are collected, there can be enormous benefits for the region, both environmental and economic," says David Rejeski, executive director of CEQ's Environmental Technol­ogy Task Force.

One of the reasons industrial ecology has had a rather minor influence on pub­lic policy so far, Rejeski says, is that few policymakers have been involved in the field. Fewer than 5% of those who have shaped the field over the past 10 years have been from government. About 75% have been from universities and about 20% from industry, he explains.

To establish more communication be­tween government officials and research­ers in industrial ecology, CEQ hosted a workshop in April that was sponsored by NSF. The participants decided that indus­trial ecology has great potential if research­ers design their projects around the needs of policymakers, says Clinton J. Andrews, an assistant professor of urban planning at Rutgers University and one of the work­shop organizers. They concluded that in­dustrial ecology research can provide the knowledge base for decisions at all geo­graphical scales. For example, it can pro­vide data for local decisions on waste management, economic development, and land-use planning; regional decisions on wa­tershed management; state decisions on hazardous waste laws; national decisions on product standards; and international deci­sions on development assistance.

Although the very broad-based, un­bounded definition of industrial ecology makes it difficult to convey the concept to policymakers at meetings such as the one held by CEQ, most researchers in the area believe the definition needs to remain flu­id in the near term. "It is too soon to nar­row the field down," says Moomaw. "We are still in the process of developing meth­odologies, and I'm sure that the best ques­tions haven't even been asked yet."

"It helps to have a vague definition be­cause you don't want to exclude disci­plines and don't want to exclude think­ing," Karn adds. "The more people you can pull in under your umbrella, the broader the intellectual base you'll have." She compares industrial ecology with bio­medical engineering. When that field be­gan, she says, it was very broad and no­body knew what it was. Over time, it coa­lesced into a well-defined discipline.^

42 JULY 20, 1998 C&EN