The heart of Baltimore's heavy industrial zone seems an unlikely place to create an environmental paradigm. Oil storage tanks, chemical plants, asphalt manufacturing facilities, tracking depots, and a scrap yard dominate the landscape. Devoid of trees, grasslands, or wildlife, the area is a monument to the triumph over nature of asphalt, concrete, and steel. Yet, Michael Palumbo, project manager with Cornell University's Work and Environment Institute, working under the Baltimore Economic Development corporation, hopes to turn this gray and gritty area into a model of industrial and ecological efficiency, where companies collaborate to cut consumption of raw materials and energy, exchange and recycle rather than dispose of wastes, and improve their bottom line in the process. Palumbo is not alone.
Trees die, topple over, and eventually become part of the soil again.
Calling themselves industrial ecologists, today's new breed of economic developers seek to link business success with environmental protection. Their goal is to create communities of independent but interconnected manufacturers who voluntarily form links in a kind of industrial symbiosis, matching inputs and outputs to the environment's carrying capacity. In such an industrial community, known as an eco-industrial park, companies would benefit from lower costs of resources, transportation, and disposal. Moreover, companies could share in environmental management, waste recycling, marketing, and product development. There, a complex web of waste and energy exchanges has developed among the city, a power plant, a refinery, a fish farm, a pharmaceutical plant, a chemical manufacturer, and a wallboard maker.