Imagine that you are an interpreter. Translate only that part of the text about evaluation methods of innovation projects.

EXERCISE 11

Make up the summary to the text. Express your opinion taking into account all the necessary information from the text.

UNITII

ECOLOGY IN PRODUCTION

Text I

Industrial Ecology 

EXERCISE 1

Read and translate the text.

Industrial ecology (IE) is the study of material and energy flows through industrial systems. The global industrial economy can be modeled as a network of industrial processes that extract resources from the Earth and transform those resources into commodities which can be bought and sold to meet the needs of humanity. Industrial ecology seeks to quantify the material flows and document the industrial processes that make modern society function. Industrial ecologists are often concerned with the haves¹ that industrial activities have on the environment, with use of the planet's supply of natural resources, and with problems of waste disposal.

Industrial ecology is concerned with the shifting of industrial process from linear (open) loop systems, in which resource and capital investments move through the system to become waste, to a closed loop system where wastes can become inputs for new processes.

Much of the research focuses on the following areas:

• industrial metabolism³

• dematerialization and decarbonization

• technological change and the environment

• life-cycle planning, design and assessment

• eco-design

• product stewardship⁴

• product-oriented environmental policy

• eco-efficiency

Industrial ecology seeks to understand the way in which industrial systems interact with the biosphere. Natural ecosystems provide a metaphor for understanding how different parts of industrial systems interact with one another, in an "ecosystem" based on resources and infrastructural capital rather than on natural capital.

IE examines societal issues and their relationship with both technical systems and the environment. Through this holistic view⁵, IE recognizes that solving problems must involve understanding the connections that exist between these systems, various aspects cannot be viewed in isolation. Often changes in one part of the overall system can propagate and cause changes in another part. Thus, you can only understand a problem if you look at its parts in relation to the whole.

Take a city for instance. A city can be divided into commercial areas, residential areas, offices, services, infrastructures, etc. These are all sub-systems of the 'big city’ system. Problems can emerge in one sub-system, but the solution to be global. Let’s say the price of housing is rising dramatically because there is too high a demand for housing. One solution would be to build new houses, but this will lead to more people living in the city, leading to the need of more infrastructure like roads, schools, more supermarkets, etc. This system is a simplified interpretation of reality whose behaviors can be ‘predicted’.

In many cases, the systems IE deals with are complex systems. Complexity makes it difficult to understand the behavior of the system and may lead to rebound effects. Due to unforeseen behavioral change of users or consumers, a measure taken to improve environmental performance does not lead to any improvement or may even worsen the situation. For instance, in big cities, traffic can become problematic. Let's imagine the government wants to reduce air pollution and makes a policy stating that only cars with an even license plate number can drive on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Odd license plate numbers can drive on Wednesdays and Fridays. Finally, the other days, both cars are allowed on the roads. The first effect could be that people buy a second car, with a specific demand for license plate numbers, so they can drive every day. The rebound effect is that, the days when all cars are allowed to drive, some inhabitants now use both cars (whereas they only had one car to use before the policy). The policy did obviously not lead to environmental improvement but even made air pollution worse.

Moreover, life cycle planning is also a very important principle in industrial ecology. It includes raw material extraction, processing, manufacture, use, maintenance, and disposal.

A final and important principle of IE is its integrated approach. IE takes into account three different disciplines: social sciences, technical sciences and environmental sciences.

The discipline of industrial ecology is to a large part based on the implicit assumption that if “we just get our technologies right”, the problems of environmental pollution and unsustainability will be solved. This is the reason why most current research in industrial ecology is focused on technological innovation, such as improvements in eco-efficiency, design for environment, material flow analysis, etc. This simplistic view has been recently questioned by Dr. Michael Huesemann from Marine Sciences Laboratorywho demonstrates that negative unintended consequences of technology are inherently unpredictable and unavoidable, that most current techno-optimism reflected in industrial ecology is unjustified, and that modern technology, in the presence of continued economic growth, does not promote sustainability, but hastens collapse. Therefore, more than technological tinkering is needed to achieve long-term sustainability. Most importantly, the problem of human overpopulation must be addressed immediately and a transition to a steady state economy is needed to guarantee environmental and societal sustainability.

Exergy² analysis is performed in the field of industrial ecology to use energy more efficiently, advocating for large scale photovoltaic production facilities in an industrial ecology setting. These facilities not only reduce their environmental impact but also decrease the costs of photovoltaic productions to as little as $1 per Watt by economy of scale.