Industrial Ecology and Symbiosis – Importance, Mechanism and Challenges

The expansion of economic activity in recent decades has been accompanied by growing environmental concerns on a global level. These include climate change, energy security and increasing resource scarcity.

Since Manufacturing industries account for a significant part of the world’s consumption of resources and energy, and generation of waste, the need for sustainable manufacturing and eco-industry has sprung in order to shift the track of economic growth into a green one. Manufacturing industries have the potential to become a driving force for realizing a sustainable society by introducing efficient production practices and developing products and services that help reduce negative impacts on the environment. This, however, requires the adoption of business approaches that place high emphasis on environmental and social aspects as well as economic concerns.

Such practices include the establishment of industrial ecosystems that aim to reduce pollution and waste, use energy efficiently, reach sustainable development as well as economic gain and improve environmental quality. This is achieved through the exchange of water and energy, and the supply of treated byproducts of one industry that form either raw materials or an energy source for another at a low cost.
Kalundborg Symbiosis is the best example of industrial ecosystems, it is an eco-industrial park that lies 120 km west of Copenhagen in Denmark. This industrial ecosystem started out as a single power station and evolved over time to form an industrial group of companies that rely on each to operate.
The main members of this eco-industrial park are:
• Asnaes, a coal-fired power station that generates electricity.
• Statoil’s oil refinery.
• Novo Nordisk’s pharmaceuticals plant and Novozymes, an enzyme plant.
• Gyproc, Scandinavia’s largest plasterboard manufacturer.
• The municipality of Kalundborg, which distributes water, electricity and district heating to around 20,000 people.
• Kara Novoren, a waste treatment company.
The symbiosis has grown over the years to include partners from other districts, as well as farmers.
The excess heat generated by the power station is used to supply homes with heat, and the steam generated by the power plant is supplied to Novo Nordisk’s and statoil’s factories for their operation, one of the power plant’s byproducts contains gypsum, which is sold to Gyproc to produce wall boards, the fly ash and clinker produced by the power plant is also sold to a cement manufacturer to be used in road building and cement production.
The surplus gas from statoil’s refinery is supplied to the Gyproc and the power plant as a low cost energy source. After the treatment of Novo Nordisk’s byproducts, the resulting residue is rich in nutrients, which is then utilized by farmers as a fertilizer. Statoil delivers cooling water to Asnaes which is used as boiler feed water.

The establishment of such sustainable development has resulted in great improvements such as pollution avoidance as well as pollution treatment both exhibited in the supply of excess heat, treatment of byproducts to be used as raw materials for other factories and the reuse of waste water. These improvements include, but are not limited to, reducing the annual CO2 emission by 240.000 tons, saving 3 million cubic meters of water through recycling and reuse, and recycling 150.000 tons of gypsum to replace imports of natural gypsum.
This being said, we can clearly achieve sustainable economic green growth, by preventing environmental degradation and enhancing the quality of life through the use of innovative frameworks and employment of energy efficient business plans that take into account the environmental impact of industries.

The establishment of industrial ecosystems, however, can face some challenges. Such as the absence of cooperation among businesses to benefit from one another, the absence of best available technologies due to the lack of finances, long payback time and access to knowledge. The absence of incentives to increase resource efficiency, and at times, the cost of extracting raw materials from their natural resources is less than the cost of treating byproducts to produce these materials. These challenges can be overcome by creating an information network that bridges gaps between firms and matches waste streams to the right resource demand, setting incentives for industrial ecosystems and incorporating available resources into the process of product design.

The Global Warming Controversy

Like any other global issue, global warming has become a primary topic that is integrated into the media worldwide. Opponents and proponents of the anthropogenic interference leading this phenomena to dangerous levels have unveiled their takes on this issue from political, social, economic and environmental perspectives as discussed below.

The atmosphere is earth’s most vulnerable ecological system and the reason for this vulnerability is that it is so thin that is very sensitive to change in composition, anthropogenic global warming has multiple hazardous implications on temperature, precipitation and sea level.
The increasing of thickness of this layer we call atmosphere causes more of the outgoing infrared radiation emitted back into space to get trapped and causes the earth’s temperature to increase, furthermore, warming causes increased rates of precipitation and most of it comes in the form of a onetime big storm events. This causes floods in different parts of the world, on the other hand, global warming not only increases precipitation but it also relocates it causing drought in various areas.
The implications of manmade global warming on the Arctic and Antarctic cotenants is greatest, it is partially observed by the severe drop off happening to the amount, extent and thickness of the arctic ice cap, in the past 40 years it has diminished by 40%, some studies show that within the next 50-70 years, it will be completely gone in the summer time.
When solar radiation hits the ice, more than 90% of it always bounces back into space, but when it hits the open ocean, more than 90% of it is absorbed, and as the water surrounding the ice gets warmer, it speeds up the melting of the ice. To Earth, the arctic ice cap is acting like a mirror against solar radiation, reflecting some of that radiation back into space, helping earth keep cooler, but as it melts and the ocean receives that radiation, there will be a faster buildup of heat in the arctic region, this will affect not only earth’s temperature but also the lives of other species that are dependent on the existence of ice.
The earth’s climate is like the engine for redistributing heat from the equator to the poles by means of ocean currents and wind currents, these currents form a loop, the wind currents are hot and are driven upward towards the Atlantic ocean, once heat is transferred from wind currents, what is left is colder and saltier water (denser and heavier water), the water sinks and pulls down the ocean current back south, this loop is called the ocean conveyer and due to heat exchange it keeps climate livable in earth’s cotenants, if temperature in the poles keeps rising, ice will melt into fresh water, this will dilute the ocean’s cold salty water (which is a pump for ocean currents), the heat transfer will stop, causing continents to go into ice ages. The melting of the ice in Antarctic and arctic will also cause the sea level to rise worldwide causing the drowning of vast lands.

Opponents manmade Global warming describe it as a 21st century hoax, and that it is a political ideology that has become hugely influential at a global level and it aims at hindering the development of both developed and developing countries. Although there is no denying that global warming is occurring, there’s no scientific evidence that links global warming to anthropogenic greenhouse gases, and that the Earth’s climate is always changing and there is nothing unusual about the current temperature. There were periods in Earth’s history when there were three times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as we have today, and if climate is viewed through the geological time frame (polar ice cores), it is very unlikely that CO2 is a major driver for climate. When an inquiry was set up to examine the scientific evidence of anthropogenic global warming it turned out that the science was very weak and uncertain.
Because of today’s industry, the luxury that’s been only provided strictly for the rich is now available in abundance to ordinary people, industrial production in the early decades of the 20th century was still in its infancy and was restricted to a few countries that were suffering from war and economic depression, after the first half of the 20th centuries, a lot of goods and services began to be mass produced for international market, this blooming was called “the post war economic boom”, but global warming began long before cars and planes were even invented, and most of the rise in temperature occurred before 1940, during a period where industrial production was relatively insignificant, after 1940 , the CO2 levels started to increase exponentially, while the temperature right after the industrial boom period were falling down until the mid-seventies, and this shows contradiction in the theory. The ratio of CO2 to all other gases available in the atmosphere is .054% which is a very small portion, and if a portion of this ratio was taken to signify the contribution of mankind to CO2 levels in the atmosphere, it gets even smaller, if global warming is caused by greenhouse gases, more warming should occur in the middle of the troposphere, where these gases are found but when temperature was measured, it was found that warming occurred most on the surface of the earth. This denies that global warming is due to greenhouse gases. Therefore the hypothesis of manmade global warming is falsified by the evidence.

The geological material that records climate like an ice sample, isotopes are used to reconstruct temperature, the atmosphere that is imprisoned in that ice is liberated and then the CO2 content is studied, this shows that there is indeed a link between CO2 levels and temperature, however there exists a lag between the increase in CO2 and the increase in temperature by almost 800 years in which the increase in temperature is in the lead. All surveys show as the temperature increases, hundreds of years later, carbon dioxide follows. Therefore CO2 is a product of warming and not the other way around.
The reason for the lag between temperature and carbon dioxide is that oceans (which are viewed as the greatest contributor to CO2 levels in the atmosphere) are so big and so deep it takes them hundreds of years to warm up or cool down, this time lag means that the ocean has what scientists call a memory of temperature changes, i.e. any part of the ocean exhibiting changes, these changes can be linked to an event that occurred decades or hundreds of years in the past.
In addition, sea levels around the world are constantly changing and are governed fundamentally by two factors, firstly the local factor, which is the relationship of the sea to the land, and it has to do more of the land rising or falling than anything with the sea, but if worldwide changes of sea are discussed, it is the thermal expansion of the ocean that is taking place and it is an enormously long and slow process.
It is also emphasized that climate is primarily driven by the solar activity and the intensity of the solar activity nearly doubled during the 20th century, and this justifies the increase in temperature.
No study to date has positively attributed all or part of the climate change observed to anthropogenic causes. The concern about global warming is that the policies that are being pushed to supposedly prevent global warming have disastrous effect on the world’s poorest people, restricting those people to only use the most expensive and inefficient forms of electrical generation (wind and solar), is the most morally repugnant aspect of the global warming campaign and sentences them to not having electricity.
In my personal opinion, one cannot be extremely sure of how adequate the computer models that were employed to study the lag between temperature and CO2 levels, Global warming proponents are trying to promote anthropogenic global warming as a conspiracy theory to eliminate financial loss to oil companies, it is crystal clear that a direct relationship between temperature and CO2 levels exists , and that in addition to many other factors that contribute to the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere, the human factor should never be neglected, the resulting pollution of human activity is not only polluting the atmosphere but it is also damaging ecosystems on the surface of the earth. Proactive and precautionary measures should be employed to decrease the impact of human activity on our planet.

Note: All information is vouched through external knowledge sources to preserve neutrality.