Industrial Ecology and Eco-Industrial Development − The UK’s National Industrial Symbiosis Programme (NISP)

Abstract

In recent years industrial ecology has been the subject of both academic and policy interest, as a means of implementing sustainable development. For some academic researchers, industrial ecology is seen as the ‘science of sustainability’, while for policy makers industrial ecology has seemed to offer new opportunities to combine environmental improvement, economic development and local regeneration through the construction of ecoindustrial parks. Industrial ecology uses metaphors drawn from natural ecosystems to suggest that industrial production can be reconfigured into an ‘industrial ecosystem’ where firms are interconnected through the exchange of wastes and energy. This paper provides an outline of NISP, the national level scheme to promote industrial symbiosis in the UK which utilises an ICT-mediated database to collect information on material and energy flows.