Industrial Ecology: A Step Towards Sustainable Development

Industrial ecology is a broad framework for thinking and acting in the realm of sustainability. The name suggests, metaphorically, the blending of ecological systems and industrial economies. The ecological side offers possibilities to learn from observing resilient, robust, long-lived ecological communities as examples of sustainable systems. The industrial side suggests that society can move towards sustainable economies by embedding the principles learned from ecological systems to the design of firms and larger social institutions. Industrial Ecology promotes a holistic view of engineering systems where the system under analysis must be viewed in a global context. This framework is quite challenging and requires the development of a set of tools to bridge different scales, from site or product specific analysis to the whole economy diagnostic and from the economic to the socio-environmental dimension, thus resulting in a multi-disciplinary set of analytical tools. Providing an adequate framework for this “Industrial Ecology Toolbox” and putting it at the service of the promotion of sustainable development is the major objective of the R&D reported in this paper. R&D at IST-UTL on the development and application of different tools aimed at providing a coherent framework for this “Industrial ecology toolbox” is revised and its contribution to the promotion of sustainable development policies and practices in the socioeconomic arena is demonstrated with specific case-studies. The tools analyzed range from macroeconomic techniques to specific environmental analysis tools, and it was shown how other tools could be developed and used to promote the interaction between economic and environmental analysis within macro and micro-scales, thus enabling the design of more sustainable systems of different complexity levels.