Industrial ecology in the context of "Industrial economy"

Ecological design or ecodesign is an approach to designing products and services that gives special consideration to the environmental impacts of a product over its entire lifecycle. Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan define it as "any form of design that minimizes environmentally destructive impacts by integrating itself with living processes." Ecological design can also be defined as the process of integrating environmental considerations into design and development with the aim of reducing environmental impacts of products through their life cycle.

The idea helps connect scattered efforts to address environmental issues in architecture, agriculture, engineering, and ecological restoration, among others. The term was first used by Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan in 1996. Ecological design was originally conceptualized as the "adding in "of environmental factor to the design process, but later turned to the details of eco-design practice, such as product system or individual product or industry as a whole. With the inclusion of life cycle modeling techniques, ecological design was related to the new interdisciplinary subject of industrial ecology.

Waste valorization, beneficial reuse, value recovery or waste reclamation is the process of waste products or residues from an economic process being valorized (given economic value), by reuse or recycling in order to create economically useful materials. The term comes from practices in sustainable manufacturing and economics, industrial ecology and waste management. The term is usually applied in industrial processes where residue from creating or processing one good is used as a raw material or energy feedstock for another industrial process. Industrial wastes in particular are good candidates for valorization because they tend to be more consistent and predictable than other waste, such as household waste.

Increased regulation of residual materials and socioeconomic changes, such as the introduction of ideas about sustainable development and circular economy in the 1990s and 2000s increased focus on industrial practices to recover resources as value add materials.

The environmental impact of the energy industry is significant, as energy and natural resource consumption are closely related. Producing, transporting, or consuming energy all have an environmental impact. Energy has been harnessed by human beings for millennia. Initially it was with the use of fire for light, heat, cooking and for safety, and its use can be traced back at least 1.9 million years. In recent years there has been a trend towards the increased commercialization of various renewable energy sources. Scientific consensus on some of the main human activities that contribute to global warming are considered to be increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases, causing a warming effect, global changes to land surface, such as deforestation, for a warming effect, increasing concentrations of aerosols, mainly for a cooling effect.

Rapidly advancing technologies can potentially achieve a transition of energy generation, water and waste management, and food production towards better environmental and energy usage practices using methods of systems ecology and industrial ecology.

Sustainability strategies are mechanisms that contribute to achieving sustainability and are well-established in the field of sustainability science. Originally, the term centered on a triad introduced by Joseph Huber, encompassing sufficiency, efficiency, and consistency. Each of these strategies has since developed its own school of thought, emphasizing different merits and contributions to sustainability. In recent debates, further strategies are discussed, culminating in a recent framework by Eric Hartmann, which describes a total of ten sustainability strategies.

Sufficiency focuses on reducing consumption and production levels without threatening human needs. Following the typology by Maria Sandberg, four types of sufficiency can be distinguished, namely absolute reduction of consumption (e.g. less travels), modal shifts (e.g. switching from air travels to trains), sharing (e.g. carpooling) and increased longevity (e.g. repairing a bike instead of buying a new one). Sufficiency is often discussed in the context of the degrowth paradigm of sustainability. Efficiency aims to reduce resource use, energy consumption, or pollution per unit of consumption or production within existing production and consumption systems - such as improved fuel efficiency in cars or energy-saving appliances. It is often considered to share an elective affinity with the green growth paradigm. Consistency involves shifting to new industrial metabolisms that are more consistent with nature’s metabolism and hence cause less environmental damage (such as renewable energies and circular design). This strategy is implicitly advocated by the circular economy approach and rooted in industrial ecology.