Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
contribution was
The Earth as Transformed by Human Action,
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a comprehen-
sive and still valuable source.Although these earlier publications did not use
the term “industrial ecology,” they did not take the prevalent reductionist
approach, but attempted to view the activities from a more comprehensive,
systematic basis—that is, they began to take a true industrial ecology
approach to the issues.
Meanwhile, the complex, systems-based nature of regional and global
environmental perturbations—particularly global climate change, ozone
depletion, and loss of habitat and biodiversity—and the growing inability
of existing environmental policies, based on reductionist approaches, to
address such issues adequately, became increasingly obvious. Additionally,
industry was increasingly affected by rapidly rising costs of environmental
compliance and cleanup, which were perceived as highly inefficient both
environmentally and economically. These linked pressures generated a
strong need for a new paradigm, a new way of thinking about these issues.
Concomitantly, the 1987 report from the World Commission on Environ-
ment and Development,
Our Common Future,
had begun the dialog on the
concept of sustainable development, a goal which clearly pushed beyond
the existing environmental regulation approach.
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Responding in large part to these pressures, industry, particularly the
chemical and electronics sectors in the United States, began to develop
practices based on industrial ecology principles. In electronics, for example,
such initial methodologies were generally developed as Design for Envi-
ronment techniques, to indicate that they were intended to be a module of
existing concurrent engineering practices in that industry, which are based
on a “Design for X” approach, where X is any desirable characteristic of the
product being designed (manufacturability, safety, testability, etc.). Thus, in
1993 the American Electronics Association published a collected set of
White Papers under the title
The Hows and Whys of Design for the Environ-
ment: A Primer for Members of the American Electronics Association.
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More
broadly, the Office of Technology Assessment of the US Congress issued
Green Products by Design,
which reinforced the focus on products, rather
than specific materials or localized impacts.
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Despite the OTA report, the product-oriented focus has been generally
ignored in the United States. It has, however, become a central tenet of
European technology and environment policies, particularly in such
Northern European countries as the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden.
Examples include the work on Integrated Substance Chain Management
