LT: Modeling the Industrial Ecosystem

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9727295 Graedel A recent survey of directions for research in industrial ecology identifies the analogy between biological and industrial ecosystems as the central question to be explored in industrial ecology research. Biological systems are customarily studied by iterations between models of system behavior and data describing that behavior. As a newly- formed field, industrial ecology has generated some usable data, but has yet to have inspired much in the way of model development. However, if industrial ecology is to be usefully informed by biological ecology, it is necessary to begin to explore models of its behavior from an ecosystem perspective. In such a system, resources are provided from virgin reservoirs by extractors, processed by one stratum of "organisms' (smelters, refiners, chemical transformers), utilized by a higher stratum of "organisms" (manufacturers), acquired by "top predators" (customers), and eventually reclaimed by recyclers. The work proposed here seeks to gather relevant data for selected resources, materials flows, and "organisms" in an urban area and to generate the mathematical relationships needed to develop an industrial ecology model describing reservoirs, the flows of resources among them and the driving forces governing those flows. The resultant model will be the first designed explicitly to computationally investigate the flows of materials, energy, and capital in an industrial ecosystem. The industrial ecology model that will be constructed will utilize as a framework the "Gecko" ecosystem ecology model developed at the Yale University Center for Computational Ecology. The equations describing the flows of resources will incorporate both resource constraints and economic interaction parameters. The investigators that will be involved include an industrial ecologist (also an experienced modeler of complex chemical systems), a natural resources economist (also a specialist in water supply economics), and a populati on ecologist (also a co-developer of the Gecko model). The result of this research will be a model that can be used to investigate specific questions of interest to industrial ecology, such as "Are there optimal geographical patterns or mixes of "organisms" in an industrial ecosystem?"; "What are the barriers to improved industrial ecosystem realization?"; "How might these barriers be surmounted?" "How are the results altered if (a) the natural resource base is changed (by the exhaustion of a resource, for example); (b) the economic structure is changed (by the initiation of a new tariff, for example), (c) system boundaries are changed (from an urban region to a state or subcontinent, for example)?" More important, it is reasonable to expect the models to help frame the thinking of the industrial ecology field, as has happened in so many other specialty areas. One can then hope to take a more enlightened approach to the role of industrial activity (broadly defined to include the service industries, transportation etc.) in our highly technological society. This framing will be especially important with the dynamic models that have the potential to interact with global geosphere-biosphere models and illuminate where we as a society and a planet have been and where we might be headed. ***