Changing stocks, flows and behaviors in industrial ecosystems
edited by Matthias Ruth and Brynhildur Davidsdottir, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2008, 168 pp., £55 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-84720-740-1
The focus of this book, the first of two volumes, is basic and advanced analytical concepts and the tools to explore the dynamics of industrial ecosystems at the firm, industry and larger ecosystems levels. Industrial ecology (IE) evolved from an understanding that economic/industrial systems generally exhibit features analogous to natural ecosystems. Chapter 2 challenges the premise that IE's characteristic understanding of nature as a model can be regarded as the field's unique identity and tests it from economic, scientific and philosophic perspectives. The authors seek a confirmation that IE has a right to be considered as the most reasonable proposition for a sustainable future. They conclude that IE has the credentials to be a subject of study in its own right but cautions that natural ecosystem metaphors should be soundly based on science and not simply rhetoric.
Part II considers the dynamics of stocks and flows. In Chapter 3, Graedel suggests that IE is becoming a study of the universal dynamics that pervades the relationship between technology and the environment and he explores the reasons why traditional energy and material flow analysis often has little relevance to the policy community, a theme explored in more detail in Chapter 5. Chapter 4 describes dynamic modelling of material stocks in order to categorise the net addition or depletion of stock over time and demonstrates this with a case study of in-use cement stocks in the USA. Chapter 5 illustrates the link between physical and economic information in the analysis of industrial systems by taking advantage of the considerable potential for linking the physical flow and stock information embedded within various energy and materials flow analyses to economic and behavioral variables. The authors use the US pulp and paper industry for their case study.
In his introduction to Part III, Janssen explains how agent-based analysis, which explicitly studies the emergent macro-level phenomena from interactions at the micro-level between autonomous agents, can be used to address a number of themes fundamental to IE. He contends that this approach can provide new insights in collective action, innovative analysis and policy analysis for industrial ecosystems. In Chapter 7, Andrews uses a simulation modelling framework to explore agency relationships in an environmental management context. He presents an applied MAS model of organisational behavior affecting environmental management, tests its sensitivity to key assumptions and shows the effects of changing policy variables.
Chapter 8 examines the use of agent-based simulation models to represent electricity markets and their physical networks as evolving systems of complex interactions between human behavior in markets, technical infrastructures, and the environment. The authors use Australia's Natural Electricity Market as their case study and describe the use of the NEMSIM model. The purpose of the agent-based simulation model is to generate and explore, but not to predict, alternative futures that may develop under different conditions.
Three important and inter-related perspectives in organisation theory are: institutional theory, field theory, and social networks, that together shed light on the organisational dynamics inherent in and critical to the development of industrial ecosystems are presented in Chapter 9. The authors contend that understanding organisational action is important for industrial symbiosis since, to achieve this, collaboration between disparate companies is critical.
The authors of the final, concluding chapter believe that the volume suggests at least three avenues for further development: (i) the need to move beyond analogies to actual application of concepts and tools; (ii) the need for a confluence of methods and tools; and (iii) the need to explicitly deal with the implicit understanding that emerging IE solutions must be enabled within economic, environmental and social constraints.
This is a book for the academic rather than the practitioner. The book is not intended to provide the practitioner with guidance in the application of IE principles, rather it is intended to encourage academic researchers to recognise the opportunities for developing IE as a discipline in its own right, albeit multidisciplinary in nature, rather than see it as an adjunct scientific subject. Academics and postgraduate researchers are the most likely audience to benefit from this book.