LIKE INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY
Industrial ecology is a new way of thinking about manufacturing, product cycles and the emerging service economy. There are two aspects to industrial ecology.
Firstly, a sustainment is made by designing an ecology of industries. A sustainment would arrive out of careful urban planning to create an integrated location for a series of industries. By co-locating those industries, the waste from each one would be a resource for another. Shared infrastructure would increase efficiency, with all energy being co-generated and by-products being used without extensive transport costs.
Secondly, a sustainment is made by designing an ecology of each product. A sustainment comes from carefully planning an infrastructure that can sustain a product throughout its life-time. It delivers the product without packaging, or at least with reusable packaging; it services the product throughout its lifetime, upgrading it a few times; and it takes the product back at the end of its use-life to recover the components and materials for other uses. This sort of industrial ecology therefore ensures that a product is sustained, rather than merely claiming that a product is sustainable and then releasing it onto the market. Product ecologies therefore dovetail with extended producer responsibility and long-term product leasing. In either case, industrial ecologies require a thorough process of relational design and long-term forward thinking to actually become sustainments, that is, environments that sustain.
