Unit 2:   Industrial Ecology as a System:  A Conceptual Framework 
                   Background Information
 
 
     In Unit 1, we mentioned that the predominant world view of our society today holds that technology can overcome environmental problems and continue to improve the lives of human beings as long as we take measures to mediate technology’s harmful effects. There are those, however, who are less optimistic about science and technology. In this unit, we will look at perspectives that are critical of this dominant paradigm, and how they can inform a different, more environmentally sound approach to industrial production and consumption.  One such approach is known as industrial ecology and is rooted in studies of both thermodynamics and systems.  Before we examine industrial ecology in more detail, let’s begin by exploring relevant concepts from these two areas.
 
 
“Entropy Isn’t What it Used to Be”* 
 
     In 1980, Jeremy Rifkin, a critic of the dominant techno-managerial world view, published a controversial book entitled Entropy that provided a compelling conception of the interplay among world views, technology, and global environmental change. Rifkin used the second law of thermodynamics as the basis for a critique of modern society and its material economy. In a nutshell, the second law holds that energy is degraded through its use; it becomes less and less useful to do work.  Entropy is a measure of the state of usefulness of energy. The lower the entropy of a system, the more work that energy can do.

    An easy way to understand entropy is to think of a home that is heated by a gas furnace. The gas in the pipe leading to the furnace has low entropy (high energy content). Once burned, the entropy of the gas increases as the energy from the gas is dispersed into the home in the form of heat. Eventually the heat dissipates into the surrounding environment as it escapes through the doors and windows. The more the heat dissipates, the greater the increase in entropy.  Once the energy has escaped the house and entered into the surroundings, it is no longer in a useful state. In other words, the energy has dissipated and is no longer useful for the purpose it was intended. Thus “entropy is never what is used to be” -- it increases all the time.

    In Rifkin’s view, entropy plays a key role in explaining the environmental problems of today. By applying the second law of thermodynamics to energy and materials consumption in modern society, Rifkin argued that technology speeds up the use of both energy and materials. In his view, the modern industrial system is a transformer of materials and energy, increasing entropy and reducing the usefulness of materials and energy.

     What concerns Rifkin and others is the sustainability of natural resource use.  They see technology as a tool that has locked society into an non-sustainable future. A characteristic of the modern era is the use of technology and natural resources in a profligate way, one that continues to transform the earth, speed up the use of nonrenewable energy, and accelerate material entropy in the process. Material waste and waste heat are inevitable outcomes of this process.  Waste heat is produced in the process of fuel combustion and is a measure of the inefficiency of energy transformation. Solid waste, produced as by-products of material fabrication or mineral extractions, is a measure of the inefficiency of a material manufacturing system. Effluent discharged from a factory or processing plant is a measure of the inefficiency of chemical transformations.  Each case illustrates an industrial system that is operating within the greater complex of the global environmental system and that is generating a dissipative loss (i.e., irreversible loss through the simple dispersion of energy and materials).  Such losses represent tangible evidence of the inefficiency of production systems, as the wastes are no longer recycled or reused in the production processes. Once lost from the system through dissipative loss, these wastes must be disposed of -- stored in a landfill or a containment pond or discharged into the air, soil, or water (where they become diffused).

     From this cursory look at the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, and dissipation we can see one major requirement for an alternatively designed industry -- to limit every opportunity within the production and consumption processes for energy and materials to get lost. This requirement produces several possible strategies:

     Another implication of Rifkin’s work is that we should increase our reliance on renewable forms of resources. Coupled with reduced depletion of nonrenewables, this would be a way to reduce the consumption of energy and resources. It may not be possible to shift entirely from the use of nonrenewable resources, but it makes sense to devise and implement strategies for minimizing the use of nonrenewable materials and energy sources.

* Graffiti inscribed on the ceiling of a room in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasedena, California.

 
 The Concept of a System
 
     If technology is in fact, as Rifkin would have it, simply a transformer of energy and matter into waste, then it is virtually inevitable that its use will lead to continued degradation of the environment. Increasingly, this journey toward degradation is global in scope, cumulative in impact, and uncertain in effect. But while technology introduces negative forces of change in the world, it also benefits society. It provides returns from the stock of natural resources that are necessary (or desired) for maintaining the ways of life to which humans have become accustomed. A hallmark of the modern world view is that technologies make progress (at times synonymous with economic growth) possible. Yet, if the ultimate outcome of “progress” is a degraded environment, we might ask (like the Bushmen did of their new-found Coke bottle) if technology is good or evil. More pragmatically, we might consider what role technology ought to play in a redesign of industrial systems such that we can live sustainably and within the limits of the natural environment.

     For centuries, humans have considered themselves somehow outside of nature, seemingly able to live less and less by the laws of ecology and thermodynamics. The increasing scale of technologies and the growing human population on earth that use them make it paramount that we rethink human-nature relationships as integrated. What is commonly known as the systems approach is one useful framework to reconceive this mutual relationship.

     A system can be defined as a group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex entity. Each element has specific properties that enable the system to function. This entity cannot continue to exist unless it has a continual input of materials to maintain itself; the entity will also have a constant output of waste materials to dispose of.  An entity that has inputs and outputs and interacts with the external environment is called an open system. An entity that has minimal interaction with the external environment is called a closed system.

      Let’s look at some examples of systems. A biologist might view the human body and its inner workings as a system. The body itself is the entity; it has a well-defined boundary, generally perceived to be the surface of the skin. The body is composed of many interacting, interdependent elements (e.g., the heart, lungs, stomach).  Each element has a specific function that enables it to help the system function: the heart pumps blood, the lungs transfer oxygen, and the stomach digests food.  In order for the body to survive, it needs inputs such as oxygen, water, food, and other nutrients.  The body also produces outputs of waste materials such as heat, carbon dioxide, feces, and so on.  The body must in fact interact with its external environment in order to exist. On a larger scale (and one more relevant to the subject of industrial ecology), we frequently use the term ecosystem to refer to the relationships and interactions between living things (plants, animals) and their environment (earth, air, water).

     To summarize, a system can be defined as an entity that has the following properties:

     Figure 1 summarizes these relationships in a simple model, and Figure 2 illustrates the difference between closed and open systems.  Keep in mind that these figures are simplifications of reality in which we define the elements and boundaries. For example, we could also define the elements of a human body not at the level of organs (the heart, lung, and stomach) but at the level of the circulatory, respiratory, and digestive systems. Our model could also have omitted some elements (e.g., the human soul which some believe is as essential as a heart). We could have even forgotten to consider an essential venue of output such as the release of energy from the human body from stress. In sum, it is not as easy as it may seem to identify all the components and relationships of a system.
 
 Figure 1:
 
 
 Figure 2:
Source: Frosch, Robert. Environment 37 (10):20. 1995. Reprinted with permission of the Helen Dwight Reed Educational Foundation. Published by Heldref Publications, 1319 18th St. NW, Washington, DC 20036-1802.  (c) 1997.
 
       Now let’s take the system idea to a higher level.  Human society as a whole can be thought of as a system standing in constant input/output relations with the natural environment. This societal system is made up of subsystems or related sets of elements that are functionally linked to each other and to the external environment (again, the definition of system boundaries and elements makes all the difference). One type of a subsystem or subset of elements is an industrial system, which we will explore in more detail below.
 

 
Industrial Systems
 
     Industrial society uses technology, both mechanical and industrial, to transform raw and manufactured materials to create goods with utility for society. Traditional technologies were based on handicrafts, manual labor, and extensive agriculture.  The products of traditional social labors were constructed with tools made directly, or nearly directly, by human hands (e.g., knives, hoes, and plows). Industrial technologies, by contrast, include automated production, mechanical processes, and mechanized agriculture. In these industries, most tools are produced by other tools, that are in turn produced and managed by other tools and so on through secondary and tertiary levels of economic activity.

     It is not only the types of technologies that distinguish industrial from pre-industrial societies. Industrial systems are often equated with processes that developed under the larger framework of modernity (Berman 1988; Toulmin 1990), within a mechanical world view (Rifkin 1980), and in urban, centralized systems of modern western society (Dicken and Lloyd 1981). But the most important indicators of industrial activity are the scale and intensity of the transformations. Agriculture that uses automated or mechanical processes, sophisticated information transfers, and intensive management practices to create high yields from the land is really industrial agriculture. Similarly, modern raw materials extraction is also characterized by intensive applications of mechanical and automated technologies, as well as by increasingly sophisticated uses of information, making it appropriate to refer to these practices as industrial mining, industrial forestry, or industrial fisheries. By extension, it may be appropriate to regard some tertiary activities as industrial services, since they are similarly involved in the intensive transformation of materials.
 
     Now that we understand what makes systems industrial, what is it that makes them systems? Based on the definition of a system from the last section, industrial systems:

     Think of the extraction and processing of raw materials such as oil and metal ores (input), and the emission of wastes (output) such as CFC’s or landfill-bound trash.  Individual industries can be seen as only one element (related to other elements) in a much larger system.  Much of classical economic geography and industrial location theory emphasized the internal relationships of industrial systems.  These schools neglected to focus on the relations of industries with the broader physical environment except to see it as a source of raw materials (inputs) or a sink for residuals (outputs) in a standard input-output analysis.

     When we consider the human dimensions of global change, i.e., which human activities drive and mitigate major global changes, our focus must shift from the exclusive concentration on internal relationships to the external relationships between industrial systems and the natural environment. Thinking about technology as a transformer of the environment, as Jeremy Rifkin did, enables us to make choices that might reduce the effects of the inevitable entropy within systems. The pace or speed of material throughputs and energy flows within an industrial system can be thought of as the metabolism of industry.  From this organic analogy, we can make a natural extension -- industrial systems are like natural ecosystems in that they are made up of sets of producers and consumers (elements) that interact with one another (internal relationships) and with their broader environment (external relationships). But unlike the industrial systems we know, natural ecosystems also contain organisms and processes that serve to recycle matter and energy, maintaining a homeostatic system with little or no dissipative losses.

     The idea of reconceiving industrial systems to mimic natural ecosystems and thereby to reduce industrial society’s penchant for using up raw materials and generating waste is beginning to catch on in the human dimensions community through the use of the term industrial ecology.
 
 
The Elements of Industrial Ecology
 

      Now that you have been introduced the concepts and ideas that inform industrial ecology, let’s put them together. Industrial ecology has been used in the growing literature on sustainable industrial development or the “greening” of industry.*   Recycling, sewage treatment, air emission reduction technology, and solar power are all aspects of a fledgling industrial ecology. Although there is still debate over what industrial ecology is, for the purposes of this module we can consider it to be the ultimate goal of efforts at the “greening” of industry -- an industrial system in tune with its natural environment.

     In practice, realizing industrial ecology would mean that humans apply the laws of thermodynamics and systems theory to the problem of natural resource scarcity, leading to a reduced need for materials and energy, the cycling of these inputs with the (internal) industrial process, and the limited deposition (output) of products and by-products. Just as natural ecosystems have evolved to a stage where they recycle matter and energy to reduce dissipative losses to a minimum, industrial systems would similarly evolve to a stage where their design and functioning would mimic this recycling of matter and energy. Hazardous waste, industrial greenhouse gases, lead, overharvested fish stocks, deforestation, and similar problems that are losses or residuals of industrial activity would cease. Instead, a conscious attempt would be made either to reduce the generation of wastes entirely  or to recycle them internally within the industrial system.

     Taking the industrial ecology metaphor a step farther, Graedel (1994) differentiates among three types of resource flows within biological ecologies:  Type I, Type II, and Type III ecologies. They could serve as stepping stones on the path toward industrial ecology. Let’s look at each.

    A Type I ecology is characterized by a linear flow of material throughputs and corresponds to the earth’s very early life forms that were largely unconstrained by resource limitations. Essentially, food comes in and wastes goes out, with a seemingly unlimited supply of both.  Picture the massive world ocean providing H2O for the ancient microscopic protozoan and bacteria and the atmosphere serving as a sink for their CO2 waste. There was not much internal recycling of waste occurring, but there didn’t have to be. As Graedel puts it, “at that time, the potentially usable resources were so large and the amount of life so small, that the existence of life forms had essentially no impact on available resources” (Graedel 1994: 24). This parallels what we could call “hyper-waste” in human systems in which a “frontier mentality” prevails. This mentality, common during the westward expansion of the United States, lead to viewing resources as unlimited, production and consumption as goals, and prolifigate waste generation as a necessary (and unproblematic) consequence of human activity. From our privileged present-day vantage point, the frontier mentality appears counter to the principle of sustainability.  After the American Civil War, however, this perspective more closely represented “manifest destiny” and was used (in part) as a justification for resource exploitation (Petulla 1977).

     A Type II ecology is characterized by quasi-cyclic flows of material throughputs that more closely resemble those of existing ecosystems. In this model, energy and limited material inputs are repeatedly cycled within the ecosystem by its members, with only limited amounts of wastes being generated as unusable by-products. In some cases, modern industrial systems have developed such characteristics because dissipative losses of materials represent tangible monetary losses. Within industrial systems, however, the degree of evolution toward a Type II ecology varies considerably by industry and place. In any event, the production of waste leads to entropy within the system and ultimately means that such a practice is not sustainable.

     Graedel presents a Type III ecology as one that closely approximates natural ecosystems.  It is characterized by flows of materials that are continuously recycled among the members of the ecological community or system. In its ideal state, the only exchanges with its external environment are energy (primarily solar) as inputs to the natural ecosystem. Type III ecologies can be said to have achieved sustainable relationships with their surrounding environments. Figure 3 below illustrates these three types of ecologies.
 

Figure 3:   (a) Linear material flows in “Type I” ecology.  (b) Quasi-cyclic materials flows in “Type II” ecology.
(c) Cyclic materials flows in “Type III” ecology
 
Source: Graedel, T.  1994.  In Socolow, Andrews, Berkhout, and Thomas, eds.  Industrial ecology and global change.  Cambridge, MA:  Cambridge University Press, p. 25.  ©1994  Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.  Any reproduction or copying of this material in any format, beyond single copying by an authorized individual for personal use, must first receive the written consent of Cambridge University Press.
 
     Graedel observes that the process of entropy has begun to appear within industrial systems in the form of large-scale, cumulative global changes.  “Accordingly,” he suggests,  Industrial ecology, in his view, is more than a description of linkages among elements within a system.  Rather, it is a prescription for the evolution of industrial systems to achieve an idealized state for long-term sustainability.  Its ultimate goal is to transform industry and technology into something that is environmentally benign, industry that “closes the loop” between the system’s operations (its internal metabolism) and its external environment.  Essentially, industrial ecology means evolving from a “take-and-dump” open system to a mostly closed system of flows. Figure 4 illustrates the optimal industrial ecological system.
 
Figure 4: The Type III Model of the Industrial Ecosystem
 
Source: Graedel, T.  1994.  In Socolow, Andrews, Berkhout, and Thomas, eds.  Industrial ecology and global change. Cambridge, MA:  Cambridge University Press, p. 27.   ©1994 Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.  Any reproduction or copying of this material in any format, beyond single copying by an authorized individual for personal use, must first receive the written consent of Cambridge University Press.