Linking Industry and Ecology: A Question of Design

David Bennett is the national director of the Department of Workplace Health, Safety and Environment at the Canadian Labour Congress in Ottawa.

The subject of this collection of essays is the integration of
industrial and ecological systems as critical factors in the
implementation of sustainable development. It slowly becomes clear,
however, that ecological principles are only an inspiration or a rough
series of metaphors such as cyclic processes, holistic thinking, and the
idea of zero or minimal waste. Industrial “waste” is to be used as a
resource in the industrial process or in a network of related
industries, a “closed loop” like the constant recycling of nutrients
and organic matter in nature. In his outstanding essay, James Tansey
also notes that there are ecological phenomena that we would not want
industry or society to emulate, such as predation, species succession,
extinction, and competition among species for an ecological niche.

Instead of presenting ecology as the main unifying vision and
organizing principle for industry, the contributors offer a much broader
platform, with social, economic, and environmental criteria for
sustainability (the last of these, again, not exclusively animate or
biological in nature). They discuss various policy areas concerned with
realizing this general program or vision, such as land-use planning,
urban design, housing, and industrial parks. Without the triple
criteria, the individual industrial practices adopted in the name of
sustainability can easily go astray. For instance, if an industry halves
the output of pollution and waste per unit of production, yet doubles
production, the environmental gains are wiped out.

There are two surprising omissions. The exercise of pollution
prevention means reducing the use of toxic “inputs” into industrial
processes, thus avoiding the creation of toxic outputs, both in products
and waste. This discipline has been developed and successfully
implemented under the leadership of the University of Massachusetts,
Lowell. There is hardly a mention of pollution prevention in the essays,
though some of the ground is covered in Nonita T. Yap’s essay on
cleaner production. A second concept is “dematerialization,” which
means reducing the volume of material resources per unit of production;
there is no mention of the standard work in the field, “Materials
Matter, Towards a Sustainable Materials Policy” by Kenneth Geiser,
again of UMASS, Lowell.

Though it does not establish a convincing link between industry and
ecology, this book provides many useful illustrations of sustainable
development in action.