Industrial Ecology is essentially the science of sustainability. No firm exists in a vacuum. Every industrial activity is linked to thousands of other transactions and activities and to their environmental impacts. It may manufacture and offer for sale hundreds of thousands of individual products to a myriad of customers, each with her or his own needs and cultural characteristics. The concept requires that an industrial system be viewed not in isolation from its surrounding systems, but in concert with them.
Dictionaries define waste as useless or worthless material.
Nature has adopted this approach because acquiring these materials from their reservoirs is costly in terms of energy and resources, and thus something to be avoided whenever possible. In our industrial world, discarding materials wrestled from the Earth System at great cost is also generally unwise. Hence, materials and products that are obsolete should be termed residues rather than wastes, and it should be recognized that wastes are merely residues that our economy has not yet learned to use efficiently. All rights reserved.