Industrial Ecology and Spaces Of Innovation

Ken Green & Sally Randles Edward Elgar Publishing; ISBN: 1-8454-2097-7 ISBN13: 978-1-84542-097-0 Price: £75.00 £67.50 Hardback, 352 pages, October 2006 Buy the book

‘This is an especially timely book. Carefully organized and well motivated, its power lies in the explicit effort to ask how industrial ecology and innovation studies do, can and should intersect.’ - Reid Lifset, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and editor, Journal of Industrial Ecology.

This book explores the disciplinary interfaces and practical implications of working across the two disciplines of industrial ecology (IE) and innovation studies (IS). Both disciplines have something to say about instigating environmental improvement and more sustainable futures. IE is predicated on the idea that social and economic systems mirror, or should be made to mirror, natural ecological systems. Proponents of IE devise models and techniques to trace material and energy resource flows as they move through social and economic systems. They propose policy and management improvements to increase the resource efficiency of such systems. By contrast, IS researchers work with the idea that innovation is a dynamic activity, vital to social and economic change and is shaped by a range of actors, in industry, in government and in households.

The authors illustrate the conceptual and practical problems and opportunities of working across this bi-disciplinary interface, with case studies presented from each and from hybrid perspectives that draw on both. These include applied examples from IE such as an evaluation of industrial symbiosis in the UK and from working projects in industrialising countries. Cases that originate with IS cover the areas of food, construction and waste incineration. New directions for conceptual development and further research are also offered. Conceptual blindspots and research gaps are identified at the interface of the two disciplines.

Industrial Ecology and Spaces of Innovation will appeal to a wide and interdisciplinary audience including academics and researchers of environmental innovation, management and economics, industrial ecology and schools of environmental engineering. Business environmental practitioners, consultants and managers working with techniques such as life-cycle analysis, environmental impact assessment and collaborative industrial symbiosis initiatives will also find much to engage them within this book.

Contents

PART I: INTRODUCTION

1. At the Interface of Innovation Studies and Industrial Ecology
Ken Green and Sally Randles

2. Industrial Ecology: An Introduction
Suren Erkman and Ramesh Ramaswamy

PART II: INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY: TECHNIQUES AND CASES

3. Regional Industrial Ecology and Resource Productivity: New Approaches to Modelling and Benchmarking
Joe Ravetz

4. Industrial Symbiosis in the UK
Murat Mirata and Richard Pearce

5. Industrial Ecology: A New Planning Platform for Developing Countries
Ramesh Ramaswamy and Suren Erkman

PART III: INNOVATION SYSTEMS: PERSPECTIVES ON TRANSFORMATION AND VARIETY

6. Transformations in Food Consumption and Production Systems: The Case of the Frozen Pea
Ken Green and Chris Foster

7. Sustainable Technologies and the Construction Industry: An International Assessment of Regulation, Governance and Firm Networks
Paul Dewick and Marcela Miozzo

8. Waste Incineration for Energy: The Experience of China
Yuhong Cen, Xiaodong Li and Sally Randles

PART IV: CONSUMPTION AND INTERMEDIATION

9. Industrial Consumption and Innovation
Jeremy Howells

10. Consumption: The View from Theories of Practice
Sally Randles and Alan Warde

11. Ecology of Intermediation
Will Medd and Simon Marvin

PART V: GOVERNANCE AND VALUES

12. Enabling Redesign for Deep Industrial Ecology and Personal Values Transformation: A Social Ecology Perspective
Stuart B. Hill

13. The Social and Political Ecology of Industrial Ecology
Kieron Flanagan, Ian Miles and Matthias Weber

PART VI: CONCLUSION

14. Industrial Ecology and Spaces of Innovation: Emerging Themes
Sally Randles and Frans Berkhout

Index

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