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The Greening of Industry
Yale to be home to new industrial ecology group
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Business New Haven
2/19/2001
By: Michael C. Bingham
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A group of industrial strategists, policy makers, researchers and environmental activists have launched an International Society of Industrial Ecology, to be based at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.
The new field industrial ecology applies ecological concepts to the organization and operation of industry.
The group hopes to stimulate communication among scientists, engineers, policy makers, managers and others interested in how economic and environmental concerns can be integrated to the benefit of both. Explains Tom Graedel, professor of industrial ecology at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, “Industrial ecology is a powerful way of finding innovative solutions to complicated environmental problems.
The group's executive director will be John Ehrenfeld, visiting fellow at the school and director emeritus of the MIT Technology, Business & Environment Program. An international group of environmental leaders will function as the society's steering committee.
Industrial ecology looks to nature for clues about how to create better integrated and efficient industrial processes.
Tools used by industrial ecologists include eco-design, eco-industrial parks, material and energy-flow studies, life-cycle assessment and organizational design.
In the industrial district of Kalundborg, Denmark, for instance, firms exchange energy, water and materials to suppress the impact of environmental pollutants. In Kalundbord, one company's by-products have become valuable resources for another.
“The extensive re-use of wastes in Kalundborg illustrates one of the basic principles of industrial ecology,” explains Reid Lifset, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Industrial Ecology and a Yale research scholar.
Following an inaugural conference convened by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1991, the field of industrial ecology became the focus of numerous research projects and international conferences across the globe. It likewise became central to several academic programs, including the graduate program at Yale.
The new group will hold its inaugural meeting, “The Science & Culture of Industrial Ecology,” in the Netherlands this November.
More information about the group is available at its Web site, www.yale.edu/is4ie.
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