Environmental Practice @ Work
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Throughout the programme you will be building the skills to help you make a recommendation for an improvement in your organisation that contributes to sustainable development.
In order to make improvements you need to be able to select the right tools for the job. The programme encourages you to identify sustainable development tools and find out where they are being used in business:

  • social partnerships
  • life cycle analysis
  • industrial ecology
  • eco-foot printing
  • environmental agreements
  • eco-design.
graphic: ECO Footprint

Tools (extract)

5 - Industrial Ecology

Industrial Ecology systematically examines local, regional, and global materials, energy uses, and flows in products, processes, industrial sectors, and economies.

It uses the metaphor of metabolism to analyze production and consumption by industry, government, organizations, and consumers, and the interactions between them.

It tracks energy and material flows through industrial systems - e.g. a plant, region, or national or global economy.

Industrial ecology is ecological in that it:

  • places industry in the larger context of the biophysical environment, from which we obtain resources, and into which we place our wastes.
  • looks to the natural world for models of highly efficient use of resources, energy, and by-products.
Ecosystems offer supreme learning oooportunites. Using finite resources, they operate sustainably, and can create extraordinary abundance.