Industrial ecosystems — some conditions for success

SUMMARY

The development of Industrial Ecology (IE) is based on the philosophy that the two systems, the industrial system and the ecosystem operate through different principles of system development and on the philosophy that IE can serve to reduce the conflict between the two systems as it learns from the model of an ecosystem. In an IE, following the roundput analogy of a natural ecosystem, the industrial actors co-operate by utilising each other's waste material and energy flows and try and reduce the system virgin material and energy input as well as the waste and emission output. In a successful IE, a business-environment win-win might be possible because the raw material and energy costs, waste management costs, costs resulting from environmental legislation, as well as the image costs of the companies in the system and of the system as a whole, can be reduced. In this paper, the IE analogy includes the four basic principles of system development of ecosystems; roundput, diversity, locality and gradual change. The principles are understood as a potential direction in which Regional Industrial Ecosystem Management (RIEM) can be developed.