Despite our declared era of ‘Big Data,’ we lack information on the flows of energy, water, and materials that support modern societies. These data are essential to understand how ecologies and the labor of people in far flung places supply urban areas, as well as how these resource flows are used by whom, where, and for what purpose. Like other places, the state of California is struggling with...

The paper discusses different case studies prepared in the last ten years in Pakistan on the subject of ‘industrial pollution and impacts on ecological setting’. On the basis of this discussion paper draws inferences, and extrapolates them under different alternatives to stipulate their implications for ‘Shaping the Sustainable Millennium’ for Pakistan and lessons learnt for other developing co...

Industrial ecologists study phenomena at several distinct levels, and linking the resulting insights could advance the field. The disciplines of ecology and economics have each attempted, with partial success, to accomplish this by building a behavioral micro foundation, and industrial ecology should do the same. These fields all study evolving systems made up of autonomous in...

From the analytical view of a recycling economy, the regional system achieves the goal of sustainable development through improving resource utilization efficiency, reducing energy consumption and ameliorating the quality of water and air. The regional economic system’s potential for sustainable development is significantly influenced by regional industrial operational efficiency, which measure...

The term industrial ecology was conceived to suggest that industrial activity can be thought of and approached in much the same way as a biological ecosystem and that in its ideal form it would strive toward integration of activities and cyclization of resources, as do natural ecosystems. Beyond this attractive but fuzzy notion, little has been done to explore the usefulness of the analogy. Thi...

The Industrial Ecology (IE) is a new interdisciplinary field focused on sustainable development. IE aims to the shifting of industrial processes from open-loop systems where different resources move through a system to become wastes to a closed-loop system where wastes become inputs for new processes. This paper introduces a Green Virtual Enterprise (GVE) model as an emerging sustainable manufa...

The industrial system operates through different principles of system development than the ecosystem. Industrial ecology can be a fruitful metaphor for facilitating the development of industrial systems toward the principles of system development of ecosystems. In this paper the industrial ecosystem analogy includes the four ecosystem principles of roundput, diversity, locality and gradual chan...

The Theory of Waste Management is a unified body of knowledge about waste and waste management, and it is founded on the expectation that waste management is to prevent waste to cause harm to human health and the environment and promote resource use optimization. Waste Management Theory is to be constructed under the paradigm of Industrial Ecology as Industrial Ecology is equally adaptable to i...