Full Accounting: Where Industry Meets Ecology
In his 1975 book The Periodic Table, the Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi drew rich and often haunting parallels between the chemical elements — argon, hydrogen, zinc — and such basic human qualities as courage, humor, greed and forgiveness. In the last chapter, Levi traced the intricate dance of carbon as it moves through nature and the human world. He started by imagining a carbon atom lodged within the limestone of a rock ledge. The atom and the surrounding limestone are dislodged by a man wielding a pickax, and the limestone is taken to a kiln. There, the atom becomes part of a gas, carbon dioxide, and is carried up a chimney and into the atmosphere.
The journey continues as the carbon atom is breathed in and out by a falcon, then dissolves in the ocean. From there it evaporates back into the air and, after a series of other peregrinations, is incorporated into a grapevine through the process of photosynthesis.
“It has entered to form part of a molecule of glucose,” Levi wrote, “hence it travels, at the slow pace of vegetal juices, from the leaf … to the trunk, and … to the almost ripe bunch of grapes. What then follows is the province of the winemakers.”
For Levi, the journey of that single carbon atom suggested the intimate connections between the human and the natural worlds. And those connections are not merely poetic: by mining metals, drilling for oil, burning gasoline in engines, spraying pesticides on agricultural fields and acting in a multitude of other ways to provide food, clothing and shelter, people have transformed the earth, both for good and for ill. The full extent of those transformations, though, often takes decades to become apparent. Many environmental problems first come to light as isolated incidents: medical waste washes onto a beach, or factory effluent causes a fish kill. The interconnectedness Levi described is neglected. Now some scientists and engineers have adopted a new approach whose intellectual underpinnings and program of empirical research enable them to take the larger view.
The emerging field is called industrial ecology, and it borrows freely from engineering, ecology and environmental science, chemistry, materials science, economics and sociology. Its goal is to examine the environmental impacts of modern industrial society — all too often a world of polluted air and water, and one in which billions of people buy and throw away an inconceivable variety of items. Industrial ecology aims to discover new methods of production and consumption that will lead — when all the consequences, good and bad, are fully accounted for — to fewer harmful side effects. Just as Levi did, its practitioners fastidiously track the flow of elements and compounds through the natural and social worlds — the biosphere and the so-called anthroposphere. And just as Levi did, they seek to learn more about how those two worlds interact.
What’s In a Name?
How can industry be coupled with ecology in one unlikely phrase? Isn’t the term “industrial ecology” an oxymoron? Indeed, the name is intended to be evocative — and provocative — in several ways. The underlying idea is that the entities that have been major sources of environmental damage can be converted into agents for environmental improvement. Industries design and produce goods, and so they possess the tools and technological expertise needed to create environmentally informed products and manufacturing processes. That is what motivates the word “industrial.”
The word “ecology” is intended in at least two senses. First, it refers to the fact that the flow of industrial resources can be compared to the flow of resources in nonhuman, “natural” ecosystems — with the implication that the industrial flows can become just as efficient. In a salt marsh, a forest or a prairie, the extent of resource recycling is striking. Sunlight, water and minerals in the soil are transformed into food for plants, and the plants in turn become food for animals. Plants give off oxygen, which animals need to breathe, and animals generate solid wastes that become food for microorganisms. Little is wasted, virtually nothing is lost.
The second reason for the word “ecology” is to place human industrial activity within the context of the larger ecosystems that support it. Traditionally, manufacturing has been regarded as beginning when raw materials enter a factory and ending when the finished product is shipped. But industrial ecology expands that view to include an understanding of the sources of the raw materials, the effects of their extraction, and the fate of products after their useful lives have ended.
By taking such a comprehensive view, industrial ecology leads to novel insights and solutions to environmental woes. On a large scale, its practitioners calculate how substances flow through nature and the global economy. On a smaller scale, industrial ecologists examine how industries might employ one another’s wastes as raw materials. And at the most basic level, industrial ecology encourages the design of products — sneakers, insulation, computers — in ways that will avoid, or at least reduce, their negative impacts on the earth.
Off and Running
The field of industrial ecology emerged in 1989, with the publication in Scientific American of an article by Robert A. Frosch, a former administrator of NASA who was head of the General Motors Research and Development Center in Warren, Mich., and the engineer Nicholas E. Gallopoulos, who worked with Frosch at General Motors. The article hit a nerve, particularly among engineers who were concerned about environmental degradation, but who were also frustrated by the frantic, haphazard measures being proposed to cure it. In the early 1990s the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering started exploring the potential of industrial ecology. At the same time, a group of materials scientists, atmospheric chemists, environmental engineers and others — many of them from Bell Laboratories, headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J. — took an interest in the emerging ideas. They convinced AT&T and its corporate foundation to fund a series of academic fellowships to bolster research in the field.
Industrial ecology did not spring fully formed from the heads of Frosch and Gallopoulos. It built on the knowledge that had begun to accumulate as workers in a variety of disciplines adopted a more holistic, organic approach to their research. Some economists, for instance, had begun integrating biophysical factors into their models by considering the economic value of the services that ecosystems provide. Product designers had begun to limit the number of different kinds of plastics they used, in an attempt to make recycling easier and cheaper. Chemical engineers were analyzing thermodynamic factors to create more energy-efficient manufacturing processes.
Success!
The most conspicuous success story for industrial ecology so far has been a commercial district in Kalundborg, Denmark. The area is home to a cluster of industrial facilities that exchange by-products, or what would otherwise be called wastes — including petrochemical gases, cooling and waste water, steam, and scrubber and fermentation sludge — in a network of cooperative relations that began in 1972 and has grown ever since.
The local Asnæs power plant burns coal to make electricity, and it provides some of the steam that derives from that process to the Novo Nordisk pharmaceutical factory and to the Statoil refinery. That arrangement not only enables the power plant to use the fuel it consumes more efficiently, but it also reduces the heat pollution entering a nearby fjord. Moreover, the residue that is generated by the air-pollution control device on the power plant’s smokestack is sent to Gyproc, a local wallboard manufacturer, where it is used as raw gypsum. As a result, less virgin gypsum needs to be mined and shipped from Spain, and scrubber sludge no longer needs to be disposed of. Meanwhile, sludge left over from the fermentation processes at the local pharmaceutical plant is treated and piped to farms for use as fertilizer.
Incredibly, those activities only begin to describe the complex linkages that make Kalundborg a prime example of “industrial symbiosis.” The term is an explicit analogy to the mutually beneficial relations found in nature — such as the symbioses between ants and aphids, or between sea anemones and hermit crabs. And even though the only exchanges that have been pursued so far have been the financially profitable ones, the environmental benefits have been substantial. By the mid-1990s, Kalundborg’s industrial network was saving annually more than 1.2 million cubic meters of water, 30,000 tons of coal, 19,000 tons of oil, 2,800 tons of sulfur and 80,000 tons of gypsum. Equally important, the network had prevented all the attendant pollution that would have been created if virgin materials had been consumed in lieu of the recycled ones.
A Matter of Scale
If industrial ecology were an art form, it would be landscape painting. Its aim is to consider the big picture and avoid narrow, partial views. Much conventional environmental analysis, by contrast, is more like portraiture, providing intimate detail on a particular subject. A typical government regulation limits the amount of chemicals a factory can release into a river; it rarely takes into account how those chemicals got there in the first place, or what happens to the toxic residues that accumulate in the pollution-control devices.
Taking the larger view makes sense because environmental problems and their proposed remedies are exceedingly complex. An innovation that appears to reduce pollution may in fact do the opposite. Only when investigators factor in a broad range of variables do the true impacts become clear. One technique for getting such an overview is to apply the concept of a product “life cycle.”
To understand the environmental impact of a product such as a toaster, the life-cycle perspective would begin at the point of resource extraction (mining metals, drilling for oil), consider the details of materials processing (making steel or aluminum), and move on to product manufacture (making the toaster) — all the while attending to the environmental impacts (air pollution, for instance) of shipping the materials, parts and products from place to place. The analysis would then consider what happens when the product is used (the toaster consumes electricity), and finally describe the disposal of the product (some of the metal in the toaster may be recycled, other components go to an incinerator or a landfill).
A quantitative technique known as life-cycle assessment enables industrial ecologists to catalogue and evaluate the resources consumed and the pollutants emitted at each stage of a product’s existence. Such analyses can be revealing — and they often contradict popular assumptions. Take the chemicals that have begun to replace chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as refrigerants in air conditioners and refrigerators. Unlike CFCs, those chemicals — hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) — cause minimal damage to atmospheric ozone. They still have an environmental drawback, however: they are potent greenhouse gases, and so they are often criticized for their contribution to global warming.
But a 1997 life-cycle assessment by the industrial ecologists Stella Papasavva and William Moomaw, both then at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., offers a different perspective. Running a refrigerator for its lifetime requires a large amount of electricity. And generating that electricity contributes more to global warming, through the release of carbon dioxide at the power plant, than the HCFCs and HFCs would cause even if they were entirely vented into the atmosphere. That observation suggests that when it comes to global warming, environmentalists should worry less about high-profile chemicals and focus more on good old-fashioned energy efficiency.
Enter ‘Design for Environment’
The desire to produce more environmentally benign products, whether refrigerators, polyester clothing or massive telephone switches, has given rise to a method known as “design for environment.” For example, standardizing the size and design of computer components could make computers easier to upgrade and more cost-effective to repair — innovations that could delay the computer’s journey to the landfill. Making soda bottles out of one instead of two kinds of plastic (recall the opaque base cup that used to be ubiquitous on large soft-drink bottles) makes recycling used bottles more economical.
Designing to minimize environmental impacts can make good financial sense. Some businesses do it so that they can market themselves to the segment of consumers who buy “green.” Others adopt the practice so as to clean up their act before the government imposes new regulations. And often, designing for low environmental impact directly saves money — by decreasing the costs of raw materials, generating fewer wastes, or curtailing environmental liability. Reducing environmental impacts at the start is much more efficient than trying to do it later, after manufacturing and distribution methods are already in place.
Although it can be useful to examine a specific product — say, a plastic soda bottle — an equally illuminating approach can be to focus on what the product is made of: the plastic itself. That technique is known as “materials-flow accounting.” By measuring inputs and outputs at various strategic points, industrial ecologists can track chemicals and other substances as they pass through any system, whether it be a factory, a watershed or an entire national economy.
For example, in the early 1990s Robert U. Ayres, a pioneer in the development of materials-flow accounting who is now at the European Institute of Business Administration (INSEAD) in Fontainebleau, France, undertook a study of chlorine in the United States and Western Europe. As part of his work, he analyzed the flow of mercury as well, because the mercury cell is a common technology for extracting chlorine from salt. What Ayres found was that the inputs and outputs for mercury, a highly toxic heavy metal, did not add up. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Mines showed as much as 200 tons more mercury per year being used as a raw material than could be accounted for in existing products or at known disposal sites. The source of the discrepancy remains unresolved, but undocumented emissions from chlorine production facilities may be at fault. Ayres’s analysis prompted the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the chlorine industry to undertake projects to reduce discharges from those plants.
A New York State of Mind
Industrial ecology is now facing a challenging test case: the New York harbor. The harbor has problems — big problems — and addressing them means diving into a yeasty environmental, political and economic melodrama. Unthinkable quantities of sewage and toxic chemicals are part of the scenery, as are fragile ecosystems where egrets and cormorants nest. The cast of characters includes union bosses, cantankerous mayors and governors, and indignant community leaders. And billions of dollars are at stake.
The New York harbor is like a bathtub. In a tub, water comes in through the faucets and flows out through the drain. The amount that comes in must add up to the amount that leaves plus any water that remains pooled in the tub. In the same way, the contaminants that flow into the harbor from various sources accumulate in its sediments and then either remain or are removed — whether through natural processes or through deliberate management practices such as dredging. The goal for industrial ecologists is to illuminate the first part of the process — how contaminants get into the harbor. Once investigators better understand the sources of contamination, preventive action can be targeted intelligently and systematically.
Most of the obvious industrial sources of pollution in the harbor have been largely controlled; today most harbor pollutants come from so-called nonpoint sources. That is, they come not from the waste pipes of factories, but from the diffuse activities of ordinary people — runoff from lawns and roads, drainage from agricultural fields, overflow from storm sewers. Those are dissipative uses, meaning that what gets released into the environment cannot be gathered up after the fact and disposed of. (Think of the lead that was once added to gasoline: dispersed into the air by automobile exhaust, it was impossible to collect. By contrast, the lead in a lead-acid automobile battery can be recycled once the battery is dead.)
The dissipative origins of much of the harbor pollution means that a so-called bottom-up analysis will not be enough. (The phrase bottom-up analysis does not mean starting with the bottom layer of sediment; rather, the idea is to begin by collecting samples of contaminated sediments and then searching “upstream” in the distribution system for the effluent pipes that released those contaminants.) That analysis must be complemented by a top-down analysis that assesses what materials are, and were, used to make what products in the New York–New Jersey area. Once industrial ecologists know which substances have been released into the environment during the manufacture, use and disposal of common products, they will have a much better idea about where to look for the source of the contaminants that afflict the harbor.
There are two important precedents for the efforts to analyze pollution in the New York harbor. In the early 1990s the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), a multinational think tank near Vienna, initiated a study of the Rhine River basin, one of the most heavily industrialized areas in the world. The study team mapped the flows of several metals through the industrial economy and into the atmosphere, soils and water system. The team found that, as in the New York harbor, the relative significance of diffuse sources of pollution had increased.
Cadmium, for instance, is a toxic heavy metal that enters the Rhine basin in a subtle way. Cadmium and zinc occur in the same ores, and are not always fully separated. Zinc is a constituent of tires, and so traces of cadmium can be found in tires as well. As tires wear out, they leave a residue on roads — including zinc and cadmium, which are washed off by rainwater into storm drains and surrounding soils.
Cadmium also exists as an impurity in phosphate fertilizer, and so it contaminates agricultural soils. As a constituent of agricultural runoff, cadmium can pollute rivers and streams. The effect becomes more intense when the acidity of the soil increases: at lower pH levels, cadmium is more mobile, making it a larger component of runoff. One of the most important findings of the study, therefore, was that if farmers were to stop spreading their fields with lime (a substance that reduces soil acidity), the flow of cadmium into the Rhine basin would rise.
The second important precedent for the New York harbor analyses is a study conducted in the early 1980s by Ayres and his coworkers. The investigators examined the various uses of several key substances — heavy metals, nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, and pesticides — during the period from 1880 until 1980 in the Hudson-Raritan river basin, which drains into the New York harbor. For each such use, Ayres and his team estimated the likelihood that it would result in substantial flows of contaminants into the harbor.
What they found was that, particularly in the second half of the period they studied, consumption-related releases of the key substances dominated production-related ones. For example, the releases of copper to the environment from smelting and refining were dwarfed by the amounts of copper that were released from the wiring in small appliances, from water pipes and from the application of copper-based pesticides. Seen another way, a relatively long time may pass after a product is manufactured before it begins to introduce pollutants into the environment. Thus sound environmental policy might be able to turn off the tap on the contaminants entering the harbor, yet the benefits of such actions might not show up until many years later.
If Primo Levi’s carbon atom were to make its way into a pesticide that was sprayed on the fields of a farm in upstate New York, perhaps it might travel from there to the New York harbor and become part of one of the persistent toxic compounds that so bedevil the efforts to dredge the shipping lanes. And perhaps industrial ecology, with its resolute attention to substances and their pathways, will ultimately help redirect the flow of those and other toxic substances so that the harbor can grow and flourish. With any luck, Levi’s whimsical carbon atom might be dislodged from its poisonous surroundings and end up — who knows? — in the stalk of a healthy cattail or the body of an untainted striped bass. That would certainly be poetic justice, and it just might be possible, too.
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Reid J. Lifset is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Industrial Ecology, a GreenBiz News Affiliate. Lifset also is on the faculty at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., and is a member of the science task force of the New York–New Jersey Harbor Consortium, which was organized by the New York Academy of Sciences. This piece was first published by The New York Academy Of Sciences May/June 2000. © 2000 New York Academy of Sciences, All rights reserved.