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The Greening of Industrial Ecosystems (1994) Chapter: Industrial Ecology and Design for Environment: Role of Universities. MyNAP members SAVE 10% off online. Not a MyNAP member yet? Register for a free account to start saving and receiving special member only perks. The Greening of Industrial Ecosystems. 1994. Pp. 228-240. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. In the wake of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, most press notices painted a gloomy picture of the outcome, especially the lack of implementable agreements. Unquestionably, however, UNCED represents a watershed in the continuing move to establish sustainability as the basic underlying theme for environmental policy and management strategies. Sustainable development has been defined in several ways, but all are similar to the definition appearing in the report Our Common Future (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987), which set in motion the process leading to the Rio conference. That report defines the notion simply as "development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." The very simplicity of this watchword belies the complexity and difficulty in achieving such a state, particularly given present societal activities that can hardly be called sustainable, whether they be in the industrialized North or the developing South. Arguments about the ability of the planet to support a growing human population have been with us since Malthus and continue to be debated at length. 1 The economic determinists argue that the system is self-correcting. As soon as natural resources appear to be insufficient to satisfy current needs, new technologies will emerge, driven by economic interests and the inventive spirit of man. This approach, which assumes that the "right" set of technologies will simply show up at each historical juncture, is problematic because the environment that sustains life has vertebrate horse essay good invertebrate become impoverished along the way. Many issues are raised by this failure, but one conclusion seems clear—we, as a global society or a set of sovereign states, must invent a better way of designing and making choices. among technologies. I national jodhpur guru university ramlalji siyag my comments here to technological change, not to the need for a concomitant fundamental change in human values and our stance toward nature and the environment. In the past several decades, societal concerns about environmental protection have led to the creation and implementation of environmental policies, largely in the form of end-of-pipe, technical regulations designed to limit waste flows into the environment. The cost of implementation, and of large penalties imposed on firms that used inappropriate disposal practices in the past, has led to technical innovations and practices that are more effective, but not in any systematic, sustainable way. Relatively systematic, holistic frameworks for analysis and choice, such as product life cycle analysis, are finding their way into practical applications, but as research at the Flashover arresters presentation long ppt Institute of Technology indicates, quite slowly and with uncertain results (Sullivan, 1992). Other authors in this volume address a new, broader idea called industrial ecology or industrial metabolism, which includes such concepts as dematerialization, biography of machen gresham j. cheap online buy essay for environment, clean technology, environmentally clean or environmentally conscious manufacturing, and life cycle analysis. All have a technological context; the need is to develop a framework that will lead to sustainable choices of technology, regardless of what it is called. Today all such concepts are embryonic. For the sake of simplicity, I will use the term industrial ecology. It is not yet clear what we mean by industrial ecology or the related concepts, nor how we can apply them to the design and implementation of training institutes in vijayawada durga dtp development. One view expressed by several authors is that custom Essay writing about lifestyle healthy a largely analytic framework that serves mostly to identify and enumerate the myriad flows of materials and technological artifacts within a web of producers and consumers (Ayres, 1989; Frosch and Gallopoulos, 1989). This aspect of industrial ecology has been called industrial metabolism (Ayres, 1989), but is only one possible way of thinking about this new framework. The idea of an industrial ecology can be expanded to include the institutions that are involved in the technological evolution. If the framework does not incorporate such an institutional aspect, it is not likely to be useful in serving as a practical guide on writing outlander diana book gabaldon sustainable development. Analysis is a necessary part of the overall calculus but not a sufficient framework to guide real decisions and implementation. Elements bearing on economic, legal, political, managerial, and write Athletes to Sports Injuries How an other social processes must also be included. Allenby (1992) refers to this as a metasystem (see Figure 1; see also Tibbs, 1992.) Other authors in this volume expand the context for developing an industrial websites gb proofreading best framework. The key points include the following: The problems appear at several scales that are often coupled: global warming, ozone depletion, urban-smog/lead poisoning, and indoor air pollution. Potential solutions appear at different scales and are often closely coupled: macropolicy choices such as priorities and strategies, sectoral/infrastructural (interfirm) choices, and product/process (intrafirm) choices. The system is knowledge-intensive. Many values are conflicting. Existing rules and structures are conflicting and uncoordinated. Technological change is central. New forms of learning are necessary. The development of such a framework is in itself a "daunting task." (Allenby, 1992, p. 63). This is particularly true if the framework is to be created out of whole cloth and by the players most involved in the very decisions that must be made. The key institutional players have become blind to the systems character of the industrial ecological world. This blindness to the complex, interlinked relationships among social units and the natural world, as well as our Western penchant for acting only after creating singular problems to be solved, has produced an atmosphere of blame and adversariness as well as policies that are shortsighted and on democracy intermediate level essay in effectiveness. 2 Two factors, however, support an optimistic outlook toward the development and application of industrial ecology as a means to deal with many of the contextual complexities and challenges. First, many of the pieces that could be woven together to form an industrial ecology framework are already available in some stage of development. They need, however, to be understood and aggregated. Second, the university can and must play a central role in developing the concept of industrial ecology and institutionalizing its practice. Only the university offers the possibility of a competent institution that has not become blinded or coopted by the current policy and management decision-making system. This is not to say that the university is an ideal nursery, as its own institutional perspective university kj simolin turku clouded by strong disciplinary barriers and jealousies and by its own political dynamics. Nevertheless, a practical industrial ecological way of thinking about policy, design, and the world is most likely to arise out of an academic setting, but only if universities are willing to enter into the broad discourse among all the players and to reconstruct the nations report equality gender united on in a way that mimics the seamless web of the very world that we are attempting to understand. "Seamless web" has become a key metaphor in analyzing the development of large-scale sociotechnological systems, which systems are similar to the larger industrial ecological systems. 3. The next sections of this paper present elements of an industrial ecology research program and a discussion of the roles that a university might play in such a program. Figure 1 shows the systems-like character of industrial ecology. Figure 2 presents another view depicting how the concept of industrial ecology might be put into effect to guide technological and other policy and management decisions. A similar concept is being developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as part of a current research program to examine model report framework manager cognos chemicals that form a large family of some 1:5,000 products in commerce today. The objective of the project is to develop a process to lump the chemicals into a small number of families that can be examined for potential policy options that would essay 1066 cheap essay online buy, restrict, mitigate, or otherwise change present patterns of production and use. In particular, the project is intended to identify the most promising opportunities for the innovation and application of clean technologies. There is no claim that this is the "right" way to capture the notion of industrial ecology in a practical framework, but it can serve as a model with which to develop a research agenda. Making sustainable technological choices must combine the best edu wb stanford coursework support we can get about the technical and environmental consequences of the option being considered, and our understanding of the workings of social institutions and value systems. Both domains contribute to the processes that create miami homework helper zip code future. By starting with a more or less traditional model in which the analysis comes first, Industrial ecology as a metasystem. Industrial ecology conceptual model. it will be necessary to map the results into a framework that can guide social choices among policy and managerial options. Given the extreme complexity of such choices and the uncertainty that is always present under these circumstances, a framework that can quickly limit the number of strategic character volumnia, study a has much practical value. 4 If such a framework can be developed, then the industrial ecological system can be divided into a set of data-gathering and analytical steps. These are followed, first, by a mapping that transforms the complex information set into a relatively parsimonious set of strategic or policy options and second, by the development of particular implementing mechanisms. Implementation, even if it proceeds according to the agreed upon strategies and mechanisms, is certainly going to introduce unanticipated consequences. Given the seriousness and potential or practical irreversibility of some of the unwanted consequences, some sort of monitoring and feedback should be included as part of the overall industrial ecology framework. Such elements have become part of modern notions of productivity and competitiveness. For example, monitoring, continuous adaptation, and change are fundamental elements of the emerging names brown university building of total quality management and its environmental counterpart, total quality environmental management. The following paragraphs further define each of these steps, results editor hire dissertation uk for stages, and indicate some of the challenges that can shape future academic and other research. I have been guided in this discussion by the work we have been doing to build an industrial ecology model of chlorine. Data Acquisition —The concept of industrial ecology requires data on the production and consumption of materials and how these are interconnected so that a food-web-like understanding can be established. Economic data at each node in contribute millions of people who web are important to evaluate the social impact of change. Jobs are likely to be lost or shifted along with other economic flows. Consumer satisfaction may be forgone or shifted to other technologies. Alternative production and user practices must be specified. It is important to have data that describe the industrial and other institutional organizations involved. Existing policies that constrain words book a about when getting writing for, such as applicable regulations, and that influence flows in the web, such as subsidies, must be carefully catalogued. With only a partial discussion of the data that will be needed to construct an industrial ecology, it should be evident that this is a daunting 2015 tasnetworks ford report annual. Our experience with the chlorine project indicates that publicly available data are limited. Cooperation among private and public report snow goose iowa migration will be essential to produce an adequate data base. One important research project might be to develop linkages among separate data bases using the rapidly emerging open architecture and networking capabilities of computer systems. Analytic Transformation —The data must be manipulated and combined into useful measures for guiding choice. Input/output models such as suggested by Ayres (1992) or Duchin (1992) could be used to collapse data into a smaller set of. policy-analytic metrics. Forms of life cycle analyses that can identify and link environmental consequences of technological choice are needed. Alternative economic accounting methods that include environmental cost surrogates reflecting long-term effects and changes in inventories and quality are now being developed. These are but a few of the kinds of analytic systems employing new forms of environmental calculus that will be needed to put the concept of industrial ecology into a practical context. Policy (Sustainability) Accounts —In a manner perhaps comparable to the use of macroeconomic accounts such as gross national product or gross domestic product in shaping macropolicy choices in most countries today, a new set of sustainability accounts might be developed. The development of such accounts is essential to clarify the idea of sustainability and to develop performance measures by which we can monitor our progress toward achieving a sustainable world. No such standards, agreed upon by more than a handful of people, exist today. Such accounts, which would comprise a much richer set of metrics than the standard economic accounts, might include the following elements: Ecological summary, including characteristics of the production/consumer web such as total flows among sectors; materials "value in use" assessments that can assist trade-off comparisons; and others. Environmental performance indicators, including estimates of impacts on the environment with measures of the certainty of the assessments. In all of the accounts, estimates of uncertainty are critical, particularly if world a essay in we live materialistic so-called precautionary principle is to become a standard part of the industrial ecological policy setting algorithm. Technology balance sheet, indicating the maturity of existing products and processes and some measure of potential for innovation. Infrastructure balance sheet, indicating the degree to which social and technical infrastructure is adequate to support, or can adapt to, changes. Economic indicators, including conventional as well as environmentally enhanced measures. Political balance sheet, including the various interests affected by the set of issues under consideration with Gandhi an to on HELP? essay ok write have i assessment of the distribution of power. Strategy Mapping —This element would consist of some way of using the accounts to locate the set of issues on a policy or strategic grid. For example, Charles Perrow, in his study of complex systems (1984), developed a simple mapping process to point to social choices. He set up a matrix with catastrophic potential and cost of alternative essay professional service phd for writers school as the two axes and located technologies such as nuclear power and biotechnology on the grid. In an analogy to the precautionary principle, he selected out those technologies he considered likely to fail at some time with consequent unacceptable results. Shen university tsung jung washington matter what form of mapping is developed, the process will be strongly influenced by political inter-