Industrial Ecology

Industrial ecology is a concept that advocates converting “waste outputs” into “resource inputs” to reduce the economic, social, and environmental costs of waste disposal while simultaneously preventing the need to take more raw materials for use in production. A 1974 paper by Harry Evan in the International Labour Review introduced the term as follows: “The term ‘industrial ecology' might appropriately be applied to an interdisciplinary systems approach to environmental problems arising from industrial activities, i.e., the production, consumption and disposal of manufactured products and their raw material and energy inputs, as well as from related mining, agricultural, transportation and construction processes.” According to Jouni Korhonen, industrial ecology uses “nature's model of material recycling, energy cascading and solar energy-based sustainable ecosystem in transforming unsustainable, fossil fuel-based ...