Industrial Ecology

Public opinion and various legal cases against industrial accidents and/or pollution have led to greater awareness among industrialists, authorities, and communities of the urgent need for industrial sustainability. Sustainable industrialization has emerged as a strategic, balanced, and developmental trend for facilitating socioeconomic benefits for the present generation without sacrificing the net industrial profits or compromising the needs of future generations and without impairing basic environmental quality and ecosystem processes and services. This has led to the new paradigm of “industrial ecology,” or IE—a field just about 20 years old and identified as one of the eight Grand Challenges of Environmental Science we are facing today.

IE is defined as the system-oriented study of the physical, chemical, and biological interactions/interrelationships both within industrial systems and between industrial ...