Abstract

In the former Soviet Union, defense-oriented industry and its research and development organizations could play a large role in addressing environmental problems. Examples include monitoring the environment from ground-based and space satellite systems and mitigating the impact of supersonic transport on stratospheric ozone. The prospects of cooperation with foreign national and multinational corporations are also considered.

Introduction

To write an essay about linkage of military conversion and environmental quality would seem bizarre to almost anyone in Russia, or elsewhere in the former Soviet Union (FSU), or anywhere. In principle, the essay can be produced—by digging through diverse materials and talking to knowledgeable people. But both the economic and the political scene change so rapidly now in the FSU that by the time one understands some feature, it has taken a new shape. To make the preparation of such an essay even more difficult, for many decades the true financial and material state of the defense-related industries was classified. There are no open detailed official statistics even now, in mid-1992. What is worse, the Russian Committee on Statistics has ceased to publish detailed quarterly reviews of the state of the economy and society. Its predecessor in the FSU, the State Committee on Statistics, regularly published such reviews in all major national newspapers. Although data in the reviews were often distorted, at least there was something official available. In 1992 only one newspaper, the weekly Economy and Life1 (E&L hereafter), has published a review of the performance of the economy in Russia in 1991, and this yearly (not quarterly) review considered many fewer items than earlier reviews.

The millions of life-forms on the planet are supported by complex biogeochemical cycles and physical transfers of materials and energy. Global change science is an interdisciplinary effort to understand these systems. This new field is also concerned with how one of these life forms, human beings, is altering processes, changing material and energy flows, transforming ecosystems, eliminating and rearranging species, and introducing artificial chemicals and species into the environment. But even when the physical and biological processes are illuminated by science, there is still a need to know how and why human societies create these changes and what we might do about them.

In 1986 the Office for Interdisciplinary Earth Studies (OIES) was formed at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research to stimulate research in global change science and to help scientists, government officials and the international community as they shaped this new field. Under its founding director, John A. Eddy, OIES organized a series of two-week summer workshops held at Snowmass, Colorado. Each of the first three Global Change Institutes addressed some aspect of global change science from an interdisciplinary perspective: greenhouse gases, past climate changes, and earth system modeling. The papers from each of these institutes have been published by OIES.

In 1991, a new and expanded approach to the Global Change Institutes was attempted; global change scientists were joined by social scientists to examine both the human causes and global consequences of altered land-use patterns on the planet.

Abstract

Worldwide industrial emissions of toxic elements to the atmosphere, soils, and water are inventoried. Sources of metal emissions include fossil fuel combustion, mining, metal smelting, industrial processes, and waste incineration. While much of the wastes result in localized or regional contamination problems, the atmospheric emissions of metals have resulted in global contamination. Soils are the largest sink for metal pollution, but aquatic ecosystems are more vulnerable to metals, and may be more affected by the emissions. While there has been a decrease in global atmospheric emissions since 1980, due to pollution control in developed countries, metals pollution in developing countries is believed to be increasing.

Introduction

Metals (and metalloids) and their compounds have been exploited by mankind for many millennia. Brightly colored ochres were put to several uses, including painting, by the cave people. Documented use of galena (lead sulfide, PbS) as magical charms, body paint, or ceremonial powder by pre-colonial inhabitants of North America dates back to the Early Archaic Period (over 8000 years BP; Walthall, 1981). Techniques for the recovery of metals from their ores were discovered around 9000 BP, and by the Roman Empire period, mine production of lead was in excess of 100,000 metric tonnes per year (Nriagu, 1983). It was, however, the dawn of the Industrial Revolution that brought about the unmitigated demand for things metallic. By the present time, over a million metal-containing substances have been synthesized, and at least 10,000 of them are in common use to maintain human health and welfare, drive the industrial economy, and protect national security.

A Novel Dialog

The 1992 Global Change Institute on Industrial Ecology and Global Change was held in Snowmass, Colorado, from July 19 to 31, 1992. Its principal written product is this book.

The institute was designed to encourage some of the first organized discussions between two communities: (1) natural scientists studying global change, and (2) a community that has focused on technological and policy responses to environmental constraints and on the underlying forces driving human activity. In the jargon of global change researchers, but probably nowhere else, this second community is called the “human dimensions” community.

The priority of the natural scientists studying global change is to understand the earth and its ecosystems—to get the science straight. For the past two decades these scientists have been knitting together previously independent disciplines, such as oceanography, atmospheric chemistry, and ecology, while consciously postponing reaching out beyond natural science.

During the same period, a human dimensions community has been forming, which takes as its starting point whatever current level of imperfect understanding of environmental science is available. This community has been trying to anticipate future levels of human impact on the environment—drawing on historical and economic studies of resource use in industry and agriculture, and on studies of contemporary environment–society interactions in all parts of the world. The human dimensions community has also been designing options for environmentally responsive technology and social organization, and they have been exploring the factors that determine whether such options will be successfully pursued.

Abstract

Since 1945, soil degradation has affected nearly 20% of the vegetated land area of the earth, with agriculture, overgrazing, and deforestation the primary causes on all continents. Industrial emissions appear as a relatively minor cause of soil degradation, because the effects of pollutants are typically measured as acute effects on a few species rather than in wholesale depletion of the soil. Soils also play a critical role in regulating the carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen oxide concentrations in the atmosphere. In view of the major impacts of agricultural activities and deforestation on soils and terrestrial ecosystems, these topics should become a priority for industrial ecology.

Introduction

Soil is the compartment of terrestrial ecosystems where the lithosphere, biosphere, and hydrosphere most actively interact, at several spatial and temporal scales. Soil genesis is a complex process which takes place on time scales of millennia and is intimately linked with the subsoil (parent material), the local relief, the climatic history, and, more recently, human activities.

Soil supports the entire terrestrial ecosystem. It makes possible the development of a variety of types of vegetation, and the maintenance of our agroecosystems. During soil genesis, rocks and till are weathered by chemical and physical geologic processes, and soil properties, both chemical and physical, respond slowly to changes in inputs. Vegetation may provide the first clue to long-term changes in soil quality because plants respond more quickly than soils to changes in inputs. Soils recover slowly once they have become contaminated or infertile. Soil modifies precipitation before water enters surface and groundwater. Microbial processes in soils transform trace gases and exchange them with the atmosphere.

Abstract

Industrial ecology (IE) is a new ensemble concept in which the interactions between human activities and the environment are systematically analyzed. As applied to industry, IE seeks to optimize the total industrial materials cycle from virgin material to finished product to ultimate disposal of wastes. This chapter provides a discussion of the main ideas of industrial ecology. Industrial impacts on the environment and the means by which industrial processes can be adjusted to lessen these impacts through waste minimization and recycling are also discussed.

Introduction

Industrial ecology (IE) is a new ensemble concept, although some of its individual elements have been recognized for some years. IE arises from the perception that human economic activity is causing unacceptable changes in basic environmental support systems. As applied to manufacturing, this systems-oriented concept suggests that industrial design and manufacturing processes are not performed in isolation from their surroundings, but rather are influenced by them and, in turn, influence them.

In industrial ecology, economic systems are viewed not in isolation from their surrounding systems, but in concert with them. That is, it is the study of all interactions between industrial systems and the environment. As applied to industrial operations, it requires a systems view in which one seeks to optimize the total industrial materials cycle from virgin material to finished material to component to product to waste product and to ultimate disposal. Factors to be optimized include resources, energy, and capital.

Abstract

Human activities are substantially modifying the global carbon and nitrogen cycles. The global carbon cycle is being modified principally by the burning of fossil fuels, and also by deforestation; these activities are increasing the carbon dioxide concentration of the atmosphere and changing global climate. The nitrogen cycle is being modified principally by the production of nitrogen fertilizer, and also by the planting of legumes and the combustion of fossil fuels; these activities are more than doubling the rate of fixation of nitrogen and contributing to the unbalanced productivity and acidification of ecosystems. With the aim of quantifying these disruptions, the principal flows among reservoirs in preindustrial times and today are estimated in the framework of simplified models. The methane subcycle of the carbon cycle and the nitrous oxide subcycle of the nitrogen cycle are also discussed from this viewpoint.

The Grand Cycles

Carbon (C), nitrogen (N), sulfur (S), and phosphorus (P), the important biochemical building blocks of life, find their way to plants and animals, thanks to the interplay of biological and geochemical processes. Each of the four elements moves from one chemical state to another and from one physical location to another on the earth's surface in a closed loop, or “cycle.” In view of their central role in life on this planet, the four cycles are here termed the “grand nutrient cycles.”

The cycles are powered by solar energy, in conjunction with the earth's gravity and geothermal energy. The nutrients flow among “reservoirs.” The reservoirs of interest are life forms (living and dead plants and animals), the soil, the oceans and other water bodies, the atmosphere, and rocks. The quantity of nutrient stored in a reservoir (the reservoir's “stock” of nutrient) changes whenever the total nutrient flows in and out of the reservoir are not equal.

Just as new branches of industry spring up to absorb the wastes of other industries, so new fields of study develop out of established disciplines. In this first part of the book the basic themes of industrial ecology are laid out, together with reviews of these issues from the perspectives of economic history, anthropology, sociology, and development studies. Each of these disciplines has traditionally approached the human dimensions of global change quite differently—asking different questions and using different analytical approaches. It is too much to suppose that we can, in one book, do full justice to each of these streams of research, or resolve the mutual incomprehension and suspicion that exist among them. It is sufficient to show, as these five chapters show, that each separate stream perceives a need to extend its own horizons.

But industrial ecology must be more than an agglomeration of established disciplines. There is an urgent need for a multidisciplinary approach to global change which is itself able to recast the questions to be answered. Industrial ecology has one advantage over other attempts to bridge the disciplines: it has a persuasive metaphor at its heart. The argument that much can be gained by viewing industrial systems, like biological ecosystems, as consumers, digesters, and excreters of energy and materials was first articulated by Frosch and Gallopoulos (1989). In “Industrial Ecology: Definition and Implementation,” Graedel develops the biological metaphor in opening a discussion of the definition of industrial ecology.

Product and process design choices used to be a private concern, of primary interest within rather than outside the firm. Design decisions reflected the firm's priorities, such as low production cost, high quality, and easy manufacturability. In recent years environmental problems have resulted in public policy interventions, changed consumer preferences, and new constraints on industry behavior. Yet in many cases, environmental information is inadequate. Thus engineers rarely understand the overall environmental impacts of their design choices; government policy-makers have inadequate information for making environmental policy; and few consumers know what they buy.

Industry is recognizing the need for new approaches, in order to: (1) include environmental criteria in product and process design, (2) improve cooperation between firms and government regulators in developing more precisely targeted, cost-effective policies, and (3) anticipate future environmental constraints, liabilities, and opportunities.

New approaches will build upon the steadily improving understanding of pollutant flows and human exposures. The objective is developing fair, efficient, and stable strategies that can win public acceptance.

Part 4 contains six chapters that give insights into the state of play in firms today, as they search for new ways to take advantage of the insights of industrial ecology. To set a context for these chapters, we review below some of the evolving methods in support of environmentally sensitive decision-making.

Materials Balance Accounting

Materials used by industrial societies undergo numerous transformations in the time between their extraction from the earth as raw materials and their deposition back to the environment as wastes.

Abstract

Success stories are important to share, especially when they contradict the assumptions of simple economic theory. Annual waste reduction contests among employees of the Louisiana Division of The Dow Chemical Company have been held for the past decade. This contest has continued to find significant, highly costeffective energy- and materials-saving projects each year, implying that even wellmanaged firms do not automatically optimize their use of resources. The additional efficiencies squeezed out of the firm's plants suggest that great potential exists to improve the efficiency of the industrial sector, if appropriate leadership is provided and if organizational and other internal barriers can be overcome.

The Louisiana Division Program

Keeping employees interested in saving energy and reducing waste is a constant challenge. Ideally, all employees should be personally committed to a philosophy of continuous improvement. Improving operations should be seen as part of their normal jobs.

The Louisiana Division of The Dow Chemical Company began an energy conservation program in 1981. It took the form of an annual contest for employees to improve energy efficiency. In 1983, the scope of the contest was expanded to include yield improvement, and in 1987, Dow's Waste Reduction Always Pays (WRAP) program was added. The contest has been enormously successful in motivating employees to find ways of saving energy and reducing waste. In the late 1970s and early 1980s many companies jumped on the energy conservation bandwagon and started energy conservation programs. But as energy prices dropped, most of these programs were phased out. The program at Dow's Louisiana Division is an exception. Not only did it not disappear, it is far stronger now than it was ten years ago.

Abstract

Industrialization is described as a historical succession of periods of pervasive adoption of clusters of technological and organizational innovations. Combined they have enabled vastly rising industrial output, productivity, and incomes, as well as reductions in the amount of time worked. The resource and environmental intensiveness of different industrialization paths is illustrated with quantitative data on energy consumption and carbon emissions. It is concluded that industry in principle moves in the right direction of dematerialization and decarbonization; however, to date not fast enough to compensate for increasing output volumes. Continued structural change from industry to services and from work to pleasure will require a redefinition of the scope of industrial activities from artifacts to integrated solutions to satisfy consumer service demands in an environmentally compatible manner.

Introduction

Industrialization is a process of structural change. Sources of productivity and output growth as well as of employment move away from agriculture toward industrial activities, manufacturing in particular (Figures 1 and 2). Rising productivity and output in industry have been main drivers for economic growth and increased national and per capita incomes, which in turn provide an ever enlarging market for industrial products.

Like any pervasive process of economic or social change, industrialization is driven by the diffusion of many individual (but interrelated) innovations.

Abstract

The presence or absence of a single species can cause a dramatic change in ecosystems, but our ability to predict which species can cause such change is limited. The disappearance of species can indicate changes in the ability of an ecosystem to sustain life over a long period of time. While there is an enormous literature on the losses of species associated with various industrial activities, the focus here is on changes in the earth's atmosphere that may cause biotic impoverishment. These include nitrogen deposition from fossil fuel combustion, increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide, and increased exposure to ultraviolet light due to a decrease in stratospheric ozone, all of which can be expected to result in changes in ecosystem function and species diversity.

Introduction

There are probably close to ten million species on earth. They are the products of long-term evolution in a variety of natural ecosystems, or biomes, that extend from the Arctic tundra to the tropics and from high mountains to the deepest sea. The presence of life on earth has profoundly affected the basic environmental conditions on the surface of this planet. Preservation of the biosphere is essential for the preservation of those conditions in which the human species has evolved and flourished on earth.

Humans must now assume a stewardship role for the biotic diversity of the planet. Barring a catastrophic geologic event, we have the power to determine our own success in this role. That is, will humans allow the resources of the planet to be fully usurped to support our own growing population and its material desires? Or will we allow a diversity of other living things to persist in nature?

Abstract

The Chinese economy is currently undergoing rapid growth. Continued wasteful use of energy (chiefly coal) is neither economically nor environmentally feasible. Thus there is an urgent need for increased energy efficiency in China. This chapter reviews recent efficiency trends and proposes new initiatives including further energy price reform and better information for consumers.

Introduction

During the 1980s the Chinese national economy grew rapidly, while at the same time there was a serious attempt to increase energy efficiency and improve the environment. Averaged over the decade, the annual growth rate of gross national product (GNP) was 8.9%, while annual growth rate of energy consumption was 5.1%. Capital was invested in environmental protection in the years 1986 to 1990 at an average rate of 0.7% of GNP.

Between 1949 and 1990 commercial energy production (consisting of coal, oil, natural gas, and hydropower) grew more than 40 times. In the same period the dominance of coal decreased somewhat, to 73% of commercial consumption. Total commercial energy consumption in China was 29.0 EJ (990 million tons of coal equivalent, or Mtce, in the common unit of energy policy discourse in China1), with the industrial sector dominating the transportation and buildings sectors to a much greater extent than in more highly industrialized countries. China is a self-contained energy economy: in fact, in 1990 energy production exceeded energy consumption by 5%.

Pollution from coal burning is still increasing, because pollution control measures are not keeping up with expanded use. The control of smoke and dust at the stack or chimney is incomplete, as is the control of emissions of sulfur dioxide—leading some regions to suffer from acid rain.

In the grand cycles, atoms of carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus cycle back and forth from living plants and animals to the soil, atmosphere, and oceans. The winds and water currents of earth move these atoms global distances.

As the cycling of these four elements has developed over billions of years, biology has become deeply intertwined with geology. Biochemical processes, driven by sunlight and involving specialized molecules and bacteria, extract these elements from storage in inorganic reservoirs and make them available as nutrients for plants. Closely related biochemical and geophysical processes return these elements to storage and replenish the inorganic reservoirs. Energy in the form of high-temperature heat from the interior of the earth drives much slower cycling, which retrieves, in the form of volcanic emissions, the small fractions of nutrients that are not rapidly cycled.

All four grand cycles are now strongly influenced by human activity. Although the interactions are similar for sulfur and phosphorus, the chapters in this section consider only nitrogen and carbon.

The carbon cycle has been perturbed by fossil fuel use, deforestation, and changes in agriculture and animal husbandry. During the past two centuries these practices have led to more than a 25% increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide and more than a doubling of the concentration of methane in the atmosphere. The principal direct consequence, just at the edge of detectability today, is likely to be a modification of patterns of surface temperature and rainfall, as well as a rise in sea level.

Abstract

One of the key ingredients of industrial ecology is the concept of vulnerability, which includes an assessment of individual and social risks associated with anthropogenic environmental change, together with an appreciation of the robustness of people and societies to adapt to or accept such risks. This discussion of human vulnerability focuses on the world's most vulnerable populations: poor, urban, and rural inhabitants in the developing world. Environmental change can lead to significant societal disruption, especially among peoples less able to adapt.

Introduction

Much recent debate about global environmental change has tended to separate discussion of the natural and human sources of change from consideration of the impacts on human welfare posed by environmental variation and change. On the one hand, human activities such as fossil fuel consumption, land use, and industrial and agricultural production are widely recognized as major contributors to “environmental vulnerability,” driven primarily by rapid population growth, economic development, and technological change. On the other hand, many of these same activities, along with other aspects of natural resource management and human health and welfare, are themselves key factors in “human vulnerability” to environmental fluctuation and change, both now and in the future.

Unfortunately, separate consideration of these two aspects of vulnerability has led to poor integration of research and understanding, especially for policy applications. Decisions to modify human activities to reduce perturbations to the environment inevitably require tradeoffs between the costs and benefits of the activities, which in turn depend in part on the sensitivity of human welfare to different environmental variations.1 For example, developing countries are understandably reluctant to forego the immediate benefits of industrial and agricultural development — which among other things help to reduce vulnerability to present environmental variation—in order to help avert the longer term and less certain impacts of a changing climate.

Abstract

Management must consider a number of factors when seeking to internalize environmental values within design and production processes. Success depends on an integrated management approach that includes a clear vision of what is to be accomplished, a workable business plan, effective business processes, and an understanding of the financial impact of reuse and recycling.

Introduction

A quiet revolution is sweeping corporate environmental management. After decades of managing environmental emissions from their plants, corporations are turning their attention to the environmental effects of their products. This new emphasis is being driven by a combination of market and government forces. More than ever before, customer demands and competitor initiatives are introducing environmental issues into product design decisions. At the same time, governments around the world are imposing broad new requirements that address the environmental effects of products and of the processes used to make and support them.

These requirements are raising the stakes for design decisions and posing unprecedented challenges for manufacturing companies. They are forcing manufacturers to reexamine their approaches to a wide range of concerns, including product and packaging design, material selection, production processes, and energy consumption, to name just a few. In an era of brutal international competition, companies must reconcile these new requirements with other imperatives, particularly pressures to compete on cost and time-to-market.

Design for environment is a discipline that provides strategies and techniques for designing and producing environmentally responsible products, which can compete in the international marketplace. To be effective, design for environment requires an integrated management approach.

Abstract

Although the scientific definition of human impacts is important to our understanding, human perception and cultural attitudes to these problems are primary determinants of political action. The psychological and sociological literature of human attitudes to risk are reviewed. In a synthesis of the literature the importance of cultural bias and organizational interests are emphasized over the individual's psychological preferences in our responses to risk.

The Perception of Vulnerability and the Industrial System

It has been widely suggested that satellite pictures of the earth from space may have fundamentally changed human perceptions of the vulnerability of life on the planet (Clark, 1988). For example, the principal architect of the Montreal Protocol on Protection of the Ozone Layer writes:

This vision of the earth as a fragile system of natural interdependence endangered by human activity is currently a popular one, particularly in the developed world. However, it has arisen as a result of satellite photographs. Early maps of a world surrounded by dragons remind us that the idea of the earth encapsulated in a hostile milieu dates back many centuries at least. Our response to the satellite images may be conditioned by our own accepted myths, perhaps including our memories of these early maps.

When we begin to explore these issues, we discover that the myth of the fragile earth is by no means universally accepted, even within our own culture.