The Biological Analogy
The biological analogy has been applied principally at the level of facilities, districts and regions, using notions borrowed from ecosystem ecology regarding the flow and especially the cycling of materials, nutrients and energy in ecosystems as a potential model for relationships between facilities and firms. The archetypal example is the industrial symbiosis in Kalundborg, but the search for other such arrangements and even more conspicuously the effort to establish such symbiotic networks is emblematic of industrial ecology - so much so that many with only passing familiarity of the field have mistakenly thought that industrial ecology focused only on efforts to establish eco-industrial parks.
This analogy has been posited more generically as well, not merely with respect to geographically adjacent facilities. Graedel and Allenby (1995) have offered a typology of ecosystems varying according to the degree to which they rely on external inputs (energy and materials) and on release of wastes to an external environment. Expressed another way, the ecosystems vary according to the linearity of their resource flows as shown in Figure 1.1: type I is the most linear and reliant on external resources and sinks; type III stands at the other extreme, having the greatest degree of cycling and least reliance on external resources and sinks. The efficient cycling of resources in a biological system is held out as an ideal for industrial systems at many scales. This framework thus connects the biological analogy to strong emphasis in industrial ecology on the importance of closing materials cycles or 'loop closing'.
unlimited ( unlimited
resources V component J waste
(a) QLinear materials flows in 'type I' ecology ecosystem component energy & _ ! \ _ limited limited resources >'\ i T ; waste ecosystem ecosystem component component
(b) Quasi-cyclic materials flows in 'type II' ecology energy
ecosystem " component ecosystem ecosystem component component
(c) Cyclic materials flows in 'type III' ecology
Figure 1.1 Typology of ecosystems
The biological analogy has been explored in other ways. The ecological analogy has, for example, been applied to products as a source of design inspiration (Benyus 1997), as a framework for characterizing product relationships (Levine 1999) and as a model for organizational interactions in technological 'food webs' at the sector or regional levels (Graedel 1996; Frosch et al. 1997).
The analogy to ecology is suggestive in other respects (Ehrenfeld 1997). It points to the concepts of community and diversity and its contribution to system resilience and stability as fundamental properties of ecosystems - and as possible models of a different sort for industrial activity. These dimensions of the analogy may point to ways to integrate organizational aspects of environmental management more deeply into the core of industrial ecology, but they have not been as extensively explored as the use of ecosystems ecology with its emphasis on flows and cycling of resources. As Andrews (2000) points out, there are long-standing bodies of scholarship that apply the ecological notions directly to social, as opposed to technological, dimensions of human activity including organizational, human and political ecology. The biological analogy is not confined to ecological similes. A more quantitative embodiment of the biological analogy is the metabolic metaphor that informs materials flow analysis (see below) by analogizing firms, regions, industries or economies with the metabolism of an organism (Ayres and Simonis 1994; Fischer-Kowalski 1998; Fischer-Kowalski and Hüttler 1998). Whether or not there is a significant difference between the ecological and metabolic metaphors is a matter of friendly dispute. For one view, see Erkman (1997).
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