Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
would have led sooner or later to a highly critical situation. Waste management in industrial
parks is a particularly relevant issue for the purpose of minimizing the global impact on the
environment and introducing an advanced model of industrial ecology.
The plans to set up a dense network of relations within an industrial park, aiming to
achieve shared goals of environmental and economic performance, have been carried out
through the creation of eco-industrial parks. In this chapter, we are going to analyze various
waste disposal methods by identifying their specific skills in the ecological exploitation of
waste products and the respective plant/environment interactions.
To this purpose, it is necessary to introduce innovative methods and tools of analysis,
design and planning, which take into account the complex relationships between the
environmental variables.
Life cycle assessment, combined with cost-benefit analysis, is part of the methodological
apparatus developed for an objective environmental assessment aimed at comparing
alternative scenarios, and it can be used as a decision support tool for the framing of industrial
and environmental policies.
In order to make our analysis more realistic, our comparative assessment of technological
and management aspects of the various systems present in the waste to energy sector has
referred to the results of a research study we have conducted on an Italian firm that produces
polyethylene terephthalate (PETP) support membranes from plastic bottles, and which
regards (like all of the firms in the same industrial park) industrial waste only as an undesired
cost
,
whereas it could represent an energy source.
1.
A
S
TRATEGY FOR
S
USTAINABLE
M
ANAGEMENT
OF
I
NDUSTRIAL
P
ARKS
The environmental management of industrial parks was a new topic until some time ago.
The situation has evolved rapidly, thanks to the introduction of regulations and directives
concerning this sector, and it has increasingly drawn the attention of public and private
institutions which are becoming increasingly aware of the need to promote sustainable
development, especially in terms of energy saving and of improving life and work conditions.
These notions, that only a few years ago were considered too innovative and as potential
obstacles to industrial development, are today topics of wide interest.
1.1. Environmental Qualification of Industrial Parks
The issue of the environmental qualification of industrial sites is relatively new, even on
an international level: it is only since the early 1990s that the U.S., together with Asia and
Europe, has witnessed the spread of voluntary experimentations aimed at creating industrial
areas equipped with tools for minimizing the impact on the environment [1].
Eco-industrial parks (EIP), as theorized by Lowe [2], are
networks of manufacturing
companies and service firms which are linked by a joint management and commit themselves
to improving their own environmental, economic and social performances, by collaborating
in dealing with environmental issues and resource use (including energy, water and
