Technological Trajectories and the Human Environment (1997) / Chapter Skim
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Toward the End of Waste: Reflections on a New Ecology of Industry
Toward the End of Waste: Reflections on a New Ecology of Industry
Pages 157-167
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From page 157... ...
The emerging field of industrial ecology shifts our perspective away from the choosing of product designs and manufacturing processes independent of the problems of waste. In the newly developing view, the product and process designers try to incorporate the prevention of potential waste problems into the design process (see Frosch, 1992, 1994, 1995~.
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From page 158... ...
Nevertheless, the idea of industrial ecology is that former waste materials, rather than being automatically sent for disposal, should be regarded as raw materials useful sources of materials and energy for other industrial processes and products. Waste should be regarded more as a by-product than as waste.
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From page 159... ...
For this discussion, energy is considered at the chemical but not the nuclear level; elements remain the elements that they are. For example, plastics polymersare seen less as specific materials than as collections of carbon atoms, hydrogen atoms, and some others (for example, nitrogen, oxygen, and chlorine)
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From page 160... ...
With only one cost and impact for each state, I am implicitly considering only the total social economic cost and the total environmental cost without examining the question: Upon whom do the elements of cost and impact fall? Alternatively, we could struggle with a multidimensional space in which many axes represent different kinds of environmental impact, various kinds of costs attributed to different actors, and political and cultural variables.
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From page 161... ...
In that sense, the graph of effort versus impact can be thought of as a conventional tool of the economist. FATES FOR WASTES To find future states desirably located near the origin of the graph, it seems reasonable to examine those that imply both the minimization of waste in the production process and the use of wastes from various production processes across industry as input materials.
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From page 162... ...
We have recently been in a state in which direct manufacturing costs are minimized, but regulation and, increasingly, social obligation require industry to take responsibility for disposal of waste in a way that has a low environmental impact. We now see demand for movement towards a state in which manufacturing combines cost minimization with low or zero production of waste.
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From page 163... ...
So can some or all of the energy used by organisms for example, microorganisms, because they may extract energy from sources we do not use provided we can figure out how to have them be our collectors. These considerations suggest that, in general, producing concentrated wastes that could be useful as someone else's raw material is likely to be more interesting in the postulated state than producing diluted wastes.
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From page 164... ...
More generally, the Internet portends cheap ways to link otherwise unconnected buyers and sellers to create markets and to search large, poorly structured databases for highly specific items. To work for the reuse of significant quantities of materials, the system would have to be based upon realistic economics, in which the alternative processes and product materials of buyers and sellers made financial sense, including process and product costs, information and transportation costs of the various alternatives, and possible final disposal costs, whether by alteration or "land-filing." For some materials lacking realistic alternative uses, fresh incentives might make recycling economically viable.
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From page 165... ...
Actors in the system respond by doing what is in their interest, or what they perceive to be in their interest, so while systems move in a direction that the policies help determine, they tend toward being pushed in the direction of a family of possible future states rather than to some specific state determined by the set policy. We need some process for deciding which policies are likely to push the system in the direction of a set of states that would be desirable or contain mostly states that are desirable or at least acceptable.
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From page 166... ...
Technical questions abound about this scheme, for example, about the relationship of families of policies to the resulting state sets to which they lead; about the degree to which simple measures of state desirability reasonably represent the complexity of real world variables; and about whether the policy sets leading to generally desirable states as described by the simple measures remain robust in the face of the underlying complexity. In looking at such policy choices and deciding whether they push the right way, discussions must also examine some of the ways in which a policy set might perversely or unexpectedly push industry towards undesirable states.
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From page 167... ...
ACKNOWLEDGMENT I am indebted to numerous colleagues for discussions over the past several years, but would like to mention, in particular and alphabetically, Traded Allenby, Jesse Ausubel, Robert Ayres, William Clark, Nicholas Gallopoulos, Deanna Richards, and Walter Stahel.
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