Industrial Ecology for Sustainable Development

Dear Colleagues,

Our planet is no longer what it once was; anthropogenic disfiguration of earth systems through indiscriminate resource exploitation has marked the new geological epoch—the Anthropocene. Industrial ecology aims to apply the lessons from the functioning of the ecosystem for balancing society’s manufacturing and consumption obsessions with environmental conservation by systemically collating firms and business processes through a circular system. Fostering this marriage of industry and ecology requires different tools, including the life cycle assessment (LCA) to trace environmental footprint of a resource from cradle-to-grave/cradle, material flow analysis (MFA) to quantify flows and stocks of materials, or industrial symbiosis to determine best exchange mechanisms to redistribute and reuse resources from waste flow among partnered stakeholders for mutual benefit. Wider adoption and applications of these emerging tools have proven to improve agglomerate economies, regional clusters, networking between firms, and technology-based integrated assessment models of the resulting “industrial ecosystems”, which exemplifies the developmental aspect achieved in harmony with environmental conservation. With current resource use and economic infatuation, long-term sustainability is of utmost importance and the resource and impact decoupling scopes offered by retrofitting industrial ecology in production systems will aid toward this goal.

In light of our situation where anthropogenic disruption is altering the very geology of the planet, adopting these models will help to achieve sustainable development goals to preserve the planetary boundaries and cater toward holistic development. This Special Issue is an attempt to capture the progress of industrial ecology for achieving sustainable development in general.

Dr. Mohammad Sujauddin
Prof. Dr. Mohammad Mosharraf Hossain
Dr. Rubel Biswas Chowdhury
Guest Editors

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• carbon emission
• climate change
• circular economy
• dematerialization and decarbonization
• design for the environment
• energy transition
• industrial ecology
• industrial metabolism
• industrial symbiosis
• input–output analysis
• island industrial ecology
• life cycle assessment
• life-cycle cost analysis
• materials efficiency
• metal recycling
• resource/impact decoupling
• supply chain management
• substance/material flow analysis
• sustainable development
• urban metabolism
• urban mining