Industrial Ecology And Sustainability

This book opens up a critical dimension to the interdisciplinary field of Industrial Ecology (IE) and one of its four areas - Industrial Symbiosis (IS). Presenting the concept of closed-loop thinking, this timely book explains how industries and societies can achieve environmental sustainability, a necessity for today’s businesses.

This book provides readers with insight into current industrial ecology practices in developing and developed countries, how it impacts sustainability, and why it is becoming more relevant. The book affects the audience to understand the scarcity of raw materials because of COVID-19 lockdowns and rising population and resulting demand. The chapters in the book shed light on the best practices to increase sustainability practices, leading to an increase in the triple bottom line. Governments around the globe are striving to meet United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 2030. Based on current trends, governments, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, will miss the target. For achieving the goals, current and future (grad students) managers should be educated to achieve the targets early. The inculcated idea of industrial ecology will enable managers to think in the right direction and use out-of-the-box ideas to increase sustainability in short-term and long-term solutions to their immediate problems and future threats and weaknesses in the Post COVID-19 era.

In the same realm as social ecology, industrial ecology and the circular economy, a new interdisciplinary field is growing: territorial ecology. Based on the analysis of the metabolism of human societies at a local level, it helps us diagnose a socioecosystem. This diagnostic is not only based on what is circulating, but also on how it is organized and why. Who is at the origin of a flow? What are their motivations? Who has the power to make decisions about it?

This book addresses the growing need for a standard textbook on input-output analysis (IO) within the context of industrial ecology (IE). IE is a discipline dedicated to providing system-wide, quantitative, and science-based solutions for sustainable development challenges, and its global importance has been rapidly increasing. The primary analytical tools of IE are life-cycle assessment (LCA) and material flow analysis (MFA). IO has been widely utilized for LCA since the late 1990s and is increasingly being applied to MFA as well. This trend is being driven by the greater availability and application of global IO data, which now includes an ever-expanding number of countries and regions. Despite the presence of excellent textbooks on IO and IE individually, there is a lack of resources that integrate these two fields. This book seeks to fill that gap by focusing on the practical application of IO to IE, specifically in the context of LCA and MFA. By combining these methodologies, readers can gain valuable insights into sustainable development issues and contribute to more effective solutions in the field of IE.

This volume gives a very interesting overview of the frontiers of scientific research in this important multi- and transdisciplinary area.

by George Vlontzos (Editor), Yiannis Ampatzidis (Editor), Basil Manos (Editor), Panos M. Pardalos (Editor)
Recent developments in computer science, data mining and big data analytics have resulted in new operational frameworks in agriculture, food and the environment, which in fact, share a strong link between them