Keynote: Developing Synergies Between Ecological and Engineering Systems at Multiple Scales – Opportunities and Obstacles

Closing material loops in industrial networks is an increasingly popular response to address scarcity of resources such as water, materials, and energy. Such networks can also reduce environmental impact, increase profitability, encourage economic development, and are likely to be steps toward sustainable engineering. Starting with early work on heat and process integration, more recent examples include efforts to develop industrial ecosystems, eco-industrial parks, byproduct synergies, cradle-to-cradle designs, and circular economies. Despite the often stated goal of such efforts to enhance sustainability, most efforts ignore or greatly undervalue ecosystems – the very systems that sustain all human activity. Ignoring the role of nature is a fundamental shortcoming that could result in perverse decisions and lost opportunities for benefiting from the ability of ecosystems to satisfy human needs.

This talk will describe advances in on-going theoretical and application efforts for encouraging synergies between industrial activities and supporting ecosystems at multiple spatial scales. At the scale of manufacturing processes, we will demonstrate how local ecosystems on or around manufacturing sites can supply services to capture air emissions and supply water. This ability will be demonstrated at thousands of locations across the United States by combining public-domain data about emissions, land use and land cover, and ecological models about the capacity of grasslands, shrublands and forests to take up various air pollutants. Including ecosystems as unit operations in process flowsheets can help find designs that are economically and ecologically superior to traditional techno-centric designs. This is demonstrated by case studies that include local forests and wetland ecosystems in the design of a biodiesel process. This approach is extended to larger scales of the value chain and economy by including technological and ecological information at larger spatial scales. Opportunities will be described for further research at the interface of sustainable engineering and ecology. Obstacles such as lack of software tools, inadequate ecological literacy among engineers, and need for regulations or economic incentives to justify the focus on nature will also be discussed.