Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
system. This may occur at a firm level; for example, process and product
concurrent engineering activities in the manufacturing sectors should
include all relevant environmental considerations. Similarly, engineers and
architects should not design buildings or infrastructure components with-
out relevant input regarding the environmental implications of, for exam-
ple, their material choices, siting decisions, and mechanical and electrical
system requirements. But it also may require sectoral integration. For exam-
ple, in agriculture and forestry, crop selection and practices should be
appropriate to local conditions, requiring minimal input of scarce or envi-
ronmentally problematic resources (such as water or pesticides) and sup-
porting long-term maintenance and enhancement of the pedosphere.Tools
such as integrated pest management (IPM) will require coordination of the
farmer, the manufacturer of the chemicals involved, and the IPM service
provider (which may or may not be the chemical manufacturer). On a
social level, governments may be the only party capable of evaluating new
technological systems that span across several sectors, such as hydrogen-
powered fuel-cell automobiles.
Robert Socolow of Princeton University has expressed the essence of
industrial ecology in six principles:
1. Industrial ecology focuses on long-term, rather than short-term or ad
hoc approaches, which tend to characterize current practice. This require-
ment, reflecting the systems approach of industrial ecology, encourages
the understanding of anthropocentric disruption to fundamental life-
supporting systems and cycles rather than just responding to the obvious
localized perturbations.
2. Industrial ecology focuses on concerns which are of regional and global
scope, and are persistent and difficult to manage. In this, it augments, but
does not replace, current environmental activity.
3. Industrial ecology focuses on cases where the scale of human activity
overwhelms the existing dynamics of natural systems. The human contri-
bution may be a significant percentage of the stocks and flows of the natu-
ral system, as in the case of many heavy metals, or it may simply affect
critical dynamics, as with the carbon cycle. In either case, the system no
longer functions as it did before human activity grew to current levels.
4. Industrial ecology attempts to understand and protect the resiliency of
natural and human systems, while identifying and minimizing impacts on
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