Product Description
For upper level courses in Industrial Ecology.
This text addresses the increasing need for knowledge about the interactions between industry and environment with the ultimate goal of sustainability. With in-depth analysis of past, present, and future issues in industrial ecology, this book seeks to meet the needs of the product-design engineers who hold much of the future of industry-environment interactions in their hands, as well as the emerging discipline of “sustainability scientists”.
From the Back Cover
To a significant degree, the first edition of this book defined the new field of industrial ecology, the restructuring of technological activity to incorporate environmental concerns. Important topics from that book are updated here, among them
- life-cycle assessment
- product design for the environment
- the incorporation of environmental considerations into product development
- integrating industrial ecology into corporations
- budgets and cycles
In addition, the new edition includes entire chapters on topics that are becoming or have become newly important to the field:
- the biological model applied to industrial systems
- the status of resources
- the transition from products to services
- systems analysis
- Earth systems engineering and management
While still serving as a practical guide to product designers and corporate managers, the new edition also provides guidance for the broader task of mapping a societal evolution to a more sustainable world, thus justifying industrial ecology's label as "the science and technology of sustainability."