Beneficial for both entrepreneurs and environment
THE term “Industrial Ecology” has been evolved as a outcome of thoughtfulness to carry on industrial activities without impairing the environmental quality. The concept of Industrial Ecology (IE) though initially based on mainly engineering and natural science aspect is needed now to be integrated into the management and policy aspects to establish it as a sustainable business strategy.
A significant and systematic change in patterns of production and consumption is unavoidable if society is to restore and maintain stable natural resources (Opoku, H, 2004). The ever growing customer aspirations for environmentally friendly products are pushing the business and industries to enhance IE in their business strategy. To succeed it will need to be adopted by many stakeholders in industrial regime, across the levels or scales (e.g. individual company/firm, region, and national).
Most of the world reputed industries or business enterprises have taken the IE principles as a design for environment, greening supply chain, life cycle assessment, eco-certification, extended producers' responsibility into their core business strategies. And these strategies undoubtedly have given them benefits both financially and socially and beyond the level of operations i.e. regionally and globally.
Policies to implement IE
Boons and Roome (2001, p. 52) maintain that "Industrial ecosystems are not simply ecologies. They are driven and guided by human thought and action. Industrial ecologies are, therefore, more precisely viewed as human ecologies….”Thus besides the analytical tools of IE namely material/energy flow analysis, life cycle assessment, there is an obvious need for analyzing human behaviour which in turn establishes a cultural and academic domain that affects realization of relation between industrial activities and eco system.
The integration of policies across the levels: For implementing sustainable IE policies, it is necessary to integrate the sustainability principles beyond levels i.e. global, regional and local what Prof Kua calls “Coherently Integrated Policy Making”. This can be facilitated and sustained through a well designed information flow and stakeholders' structure network. Through this network the stakeholders of different level interact, contradict and in turn come out with certain feedback. With development and anagement of industrial symbiosis at the local and regional level in mind, Fredrik von Malmborg takes a closer look at the role of local authorities in the transfer of knowledge, information and ideas to actors in inter-organizational networks related to management for regional sustainable development. He stresses the importance of mutual trust among the potential members of a network as a basic condition for successful inter-organizational collaboration.
Greening the supply chain: This policy should be applied for the core supplier of raw materials for ultimate finished products which requires the inter-organizational management of industrial system. Thus the buyer should be ensured that their suppliers have also complied with the environmental standards they adopted.
Organization and management of inter-firm stakeholders: IE focuses on groups of firms and their stakeholders thus their management is of huge importance regarding integration of corporate environmental management into IE principles. Stakeholders can also be seen as providing new opportunities like getting new business for wastes generated in an industry which had no previous value (Korhonen, J et.al). Thus material cycles and energy cascades would be enabled by cooperative networks between manufacturing firms, energy industries and other societal actors including, e.g., agriculture, forestry and households (Chiu, A et al) Sometimes this, however, organization seems very difficult due to conflict of interests among the stakeholders and firms.
Development and management of I E Industrial ecosystem is not isolated from natural ecosystem but unlike the later it is much self controlled and complicated system. Only various human actors can develop and mange the industrial ecosystem and this can be possible through public-private partnership with central role of authorities. Design for environment, economic regulations and policies for promoting innovations, partnership and agreement between government bodies and business enterprises can be taken into consideration for this policy.
Extended producer responsibility: This is towards further thinking the industrial ecosystem development where the producers are obliged to perform some kind of responsibilities like taking back their products after their end of life for recycle or disposal in an environmentally friendly way.
Certification: The certification and labeling of the products that have been produced and achieved certain environmental standards will promote the market of those products to rational consumers. This will also ensure the greening of its supply chain and life cycle assessment.
Servicizing: Another possible policy to be implemented is the sense of sharing product rather than owning it. If any product can serve more than one or two persons, then they can mutually share that service which will enable less resource consumption and in turn less waste generation.
Conclusion
The implementation of the discussed policies will undoubtedly be beneficial for both industries and environment but the main problem is with the availability of funds for the firms. Especially this problem is acute in South-East Asian region. Another problem in this region found by Prof Chertow is the organization of proliferated small firms. But the intra-organizational network and information flow can make it easier to overcome the short-time difficulties.
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