ON THE CONCEPT OF INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY

The term industrial ecology was conceived to suggest that industrial a ctivity can be thought of and approached in much the same way as a bio logical ecosystem and that in its ideal form it would strive toward in tegration of activities and cyclization of resources, as do natural ec osystems. Beyond this attractive but fuzzy notion, little has been don e to explore the usefulness of the analogy. This paper examines the st ructural framework of biological ecology and the tools used for its st udy, and it demonstrates that many aspects of biological organisms and ecosystems (for example, food webs, engineering activities, community development) do have parallels in industrial organisms and ecosystems . Some of the tools of biological ecology appear to be applicable to i ndustrial ecology, and vice versa. In a world in which no biological e cosystem is free of human influence and no industrial ecosystem is fre e of biological influence, it is appropriate to abandon the artificial division between the two frameworks and develop a new synthesis-Earth system ecology-as the logical construct for all of Earth's ecosystems .