The evolution of the world’s industrial activity into a sustainable and environmentally benign system requires a long-range view and a deep analysis of the environmental implications of today’s industrial systems, and a creative approach to the design of services, products, and government policy (Socolow et al. 1994: frontispiece).

Barriers to Industrial Ecology

 

     The first use of the term “industrial ecology” is recent*  and was popularized by Robert Frosch (1994, 1995a, 1995b) in his articles in Environment and Scientific American.  According to Frosch, there is a great deal of interest in industrial ecology and numerous efforts to achieve it have begun, but important barriers remain.  These barriers fall into six general categories: technical, economic, regulatory, legal, informational, and organizational.

     A technical barrier is the physical impossibility of conducting industrial activities such as recycling and waste minimization.  Right now, for example, there is no technology sophisticated enough to chemically transform radioactive waste into useful material, even if a nuclear power plant had the financial capability to afford it. Currently, the waste is either protected in storage or is kept in transit from one site to another.

     Economic barriers are formidable. Firms weigh the cost of retrieving and recycling their by-products and wastes against the cost of either obtaining new materials or of simply disposing of the wastes.  Even if it is technically possible to reuse and recycle, a firm will not do so unless it is cost-effective.  When products are created and when wastes are disposed of, materials are mixed together.  Almost always, they must be separated into their constituent parts in order to be recycled.  This separation requires work and some financial expense.  You are probably familiar with the washing and/or sorting involved in the recycling of glass, plastic, and paper waste collected by municipal recycling programs.  Of course, much of this labor is voluntary (unless recycling is mandated by law) or unpaid.  Nevertheless, the work needed to turn the waste material into useful products continues inside the factory, where sophisticated dismantling and separation technologies are employed.  Some materials are more easily recycled (entail a lower cost) than others.  Metals are relatively easy to recycle. For example, soda cans (minus the labeling) are all essentially composed of aluminum.  Thus, the extra time to consider how the product's constituent elements should be separated and the energy to do so, do not have to be expended.  When you recycle aluminum, you get aluminum.  Organic waste, on the other hand, is much more difficult to recycle and requires additional decisions about what to recycle (i.e., the constituent elements or the energy stored in the chemical bonds between them).  These decisions will be based heavily, although not entirely as we shall see, on cost.

     Regulatory provisions such as taxes, fines, and pollution quotas have been used to impose artificial (but environmentally related) costs on firms that would otherwise be ignored in an open-system method of waste control and resource usage.  The intent of these regulations is to force businesses to minimize their waste and to recycle. These regulatory provisions, however, can also serve as barriers. Regulations often contradict each other, leaving industries in a bind about what they can or cannot do.  In response to many regulations, some industries have simply shifted the type of waste they produce from one form to another. When firms were made responsible for air- and water-borne wastes, they often created more solid waste instead.  For example, some industrial facilities use “scrubbers” to remove particulate pollution from their air emissions.  Although this technology helps control air pollution, it also produces a solid waste known as sludge that must be disposed of.
 
      Legal barriers are laws that discourage firms, usually unintentionally, from practicing industrial ecology.  For example, according to a “joint and several liability” clause associated with lawsuits, all firms involved in the production, use, and/or disposal of a toxic material are responsible for any damages resulting from the product. Thus, a firm that supplies a harmless component of the product can be held responsible if the product in which that material is eventually used (by another firm) is harmful.

     The remaining barriers are informational and organizational.  Informational barriers refer to a firm's lack of knowledge of (or inability to find out) the costs involved in taking on an industrial ecology production system or practice.  Organizational barriers are often the “corporate culture” or “internal incentive system” of a firm that conflicts with the ideals of industrial ecology.  Shareholders, corporate executives, and managers can become so accustomed to placing value on increased rates of production and profit that the ideals and values implied in industrial ecology are seen as foolish and contradictory.

     These barriers to industrial ecology also produce opportunities (e.g., using cost-efficient “green” technologies, implementing practical regulatory structures, facilitating the distribution of information).  Overcoming the barriers to industrial ecology will require actions by individuals, firms, and governments.  As you read through the rest of this unit, keep in mind these barriers and opportunities.

Product Life Cycle Assessments

 

     It is probably not feasible to turn every individual firm or industry into a Type II or III industrial ecological system. It seems much more realistic to link different companies and industries such that what one company produces as “waste” could be used as inputs by another. For example, a company that produces waste water containing metallic elements could supply it to another company that needs it as input into its production process.  In order to establish the most optimal linkages between firms and industries, it is necessary, however, to know exactly what materials go in and come out of each participant's production process. In other words, each product needs to be analyzed from “cradle to grave” for material and energy flows to identify the types and quantities of materials needed and available. One useful analytical tool to do this is a product life cycle assessment. It allows companies and policy-makers to integrate environmental concerns into economic decisions. According to Richards and colleagues,

 [A product life cycle] approach requires that, environmental impacts -- with “environmental” taken broadly to include relevant safety, health, and social factors -- be understood and summed up across the lifetime of the product, process, material, technology, or service being evaluated.  The goal is to reduce to a minimum the overall environmental impact of a product or process, and not simply address one aspect of that impact.  The goal becomes important because minimizing the impacts of the subsystem does not insure that the impacts of the entire system are minimized, or even reduced (Richards et al. 1994: 13).

     The concept of the life cycle assessment developed out of the Coca-Cola study and other similar studies. The fundamental goal is to help producers and consumers choose the most appropriate product or process.  The choice is often made on the basis of calculating energy and materials flows, as the following example of grocery bags illustrates:

The purpose of this study was to determine the energy and environmental impacts of polyethylene and paper grocery sacks.  In this study the term impact refers to the quantities of fuel and raw materials consumed and the emissions released to the environment.  The comparative recyclability, incineration, and landfill impacts of these sacks were also addressed in this analysis. (Franklin cited in Duda and Shaw 1996).

     Product life cycle assessments, however, do not always provide consumers with clear cut answers.  Consider the ongoing debates over paper vs. styrofoam disposable cups, cloth vs. disposable diapers, and paper vs. plastic grocery bags. Numerous life cycle studies have been conducted on these products with conflicting results. One reason for the conflicting results is the problem of delineating system boundaries. How far must one take the analysis?  For example, in some cases solid waste is incinerated to create energy. Should this energy production be deducted from the sum total of energy used to create the product? This also presents a geographical problem. Should life cycle assessments be different for products consumed in different places? After all, a consumer in one country may not have the same ability to recycle his or her waste as a consumer in another country because of a lack of infrastructure, incentives, and so on. The second point of contention in life cycle studies involves comparing trade-offs. How does one choose between a product that consumes less energy but produces more solid waste and an alternative product that may consume more energy but produce less waste? In all of these instances public perceptions and preferences play an important role in deciding such questions.
 
 Figure 5 is a model of the entire industrial ecology cycle and Figure 6 illustrates a life cycle for one specific product -- a motor vehicle.
 

Source:  Graedel, T. 1994.  Industrial ecology: Definition and implementation.  In R. Socolow, C. Andrews, F. Berkhout, and V. Thomas, eds. Industrial ecology and global change. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, his Figure 6. ©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.

Note:  Rectangles indicate products, ovals indicate processes.  
Source:  France, W. and V. Thomas.  Industrial ecology in the manufacturing of consumer motor vehicle life cycle products.  In R. Socolow, C. Andrews, F. Berkhout, and V. Thomas, eds. Industrial ecology and global change.  Cambridge, MA:  Cambridge University Press, their Figure 4.   
©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.

    In the next section, let’s take the issue of barriers and opportunities from the local to the global scale. Clearly, not all industries and nations can begin the evolution toward industrial ecology from an advantaged position like those in more developed countries like the US.

Moving Toward Industrial Ecology on an Uneven Playing Field:  The North/South Cleavage

 

     Unit 1 outlined the development of the global industrial system in terms of the increasing ability that technology has given humans to transform their local, regional, and global environments and to influence culture as well.  As we noted, these changes do not take place homogeneously across the globe. There was, and is, regional variability in the effects of technological change. Some people and places have been devastated by the effects of technological change while others have profited.

     The global system has experienced not only marked technological change in the course of its creation, but also political and economic changes. In short, there is a clear division in the economic and political power among the nations of the world.  The two parts of this division are commonly referred to as the developed and developing countries, the First World and Third World, or the North and the South.  Knox and Agnew, borrowing from Meier and Baldwin, describe this division in terms of core and periphery countries:

A country is at the core of the world economy if it plays a dominant, active role in world trade.  Usually such a country is a rich, market type economy of the primarily industrial or agricultural-industrial variety.  Foreign trade revolves around it: it is a large exporter and importer, and the international movement of capital normally occurs from it to other countries (Meier and Baldwin 1957: 147).

In contrast, . . . a country could be considered peripheral if it plays a secondary or passive role in world trade.  In terms of their domestic characteristics, peripheral countries may be market-type economies or subsistence-type economies.  The common feature of a peripheral economy is its external dependence on the centre as the source of a large proportion of imports, as the destination for a large proportion of exports, and as a lender of capital (Meier and Baldwin 1957: 147) (Knox and Agnew 1994: 16-17).

     Core-periphery divisions intensify barriers to industrial ecology.  The periphery is at a disadvantage in its attempts to minimize its environmental impacts.  People in the periphery have much lower incomes, and the core has an advantage in terms of its power to influence rules and regulations, international trade organizations, and the financial institutions of the world economy. This uneven distribution of money and power has pervaded (to a greater or lesser extent) all international meetings on the major global environmental issues such as global warming, hazardous waste trading, deforestation, and population issues.

      Let’s take global warming as an example.  While the “developed” countries (core or Northern countries) have relied on the burning of vast amounts of fossil fuel to reach and maintain their standard of living, the “developing” (peripheral/Southern) countries, which contribute much lower greenhouse gas emissions per capita to the global total, are being asked to hold back the reins on their own development. At the same time, many in the developed world maintain that only economic development will be able to curb the exponential population growth occurring in the South. The rich nations, with only 25% of the world’s population, produce more than half of all greenhouse gases. Most of  this energy burning goes toward fueling what most peripheral citizens would consider luxury items: cars, TV’s, microwaves, and other amenities. In the periphery, most contributions to climate change are coming from agriculture and forests, in the form of methane from cattle and rice paddies, and carbon released from the burning of trees. These activities are largely associated with survival efforts.

     At the same time, Third World leaders are desperately trying to increase the availability of electricity and oil for development in their countries while millions of Third World citizens labor to increase their standard of living to one that comes closer to that of the First World. To achieve these goals, large investments are required in the periphery. The pressing issue here is that if nations on the periphery follow the same wasteful road to development as the core countries have taken, the global atmosphere and the earth’s resources will be dangerously affected.  Meanwhile, the periphery cannot afford the advanced pollution control technology that the core now possesses. The popular solution being proposed in international negotiation circles is for the rich core countries to finance the necessary technology, while simultaneously reducing their own emissions.

     In short, the move toward industrial ecology at the global level is only to some extent a technological problem. It is also a political and economic problem involving complex issues such as population growth, lifestyle choices, economic development, equity, and international justice. Again, these challenges are daunting and will require action at all scales from the farm and firm to the international negotiating table and on all fronts (regulatory, political, organizational, and educational).  Nations across the globe need to turn to systems thinking regarding their economies and the global environment. The essence of systemic and cumulative global changes is that what we do in one place can change what happens to all of us.