Industrial Symbiosis - an environmental perspective on regional development

Abstract

Industrial Ecology is a collective term for a number of business-centered systems-oriented approaches to improve the eco-efficiency of industry. Employing ecological metaphors, IE asks questions about the sustainability of the current industrial paradigm. In essence, it argues that the traditional model of industrial activity where individual manufacturing processes take in raw materials and generate products to be sold plus waste for disposal, needs to be transformed into a more integrated "closed-loop" model: an industrial ecosystem. Here raw material extraction and waste generation are minimized since waste serves as the raw material for other production processes.