Towards industrial ecology: sustainable development as a concept of ecological modernization

Abstract

This paper deals with the key role of ecological modernization in bringing about sustainable development. So far, two strategies of sustainable development have been discussed: sufficiency and efficiency. Sufficiency is preferred by the organized ecology movement (non-governmental organizations (NGOs)), meaning self-limitation of material needs, withdrawal from the free world-market economy and an egalitarian distribution of the remaining scarce resources. Contrary to that, industry and business have adopted the ‘efficiency revolution’ as a strategy to allow further economic growth and ecological adaptation of industrial production by improving the environmental performance, i.e. improving the efficient use of material and energy, thus increasing resource productivity in addition to labour and capital productivity. There are good reasons for both sufficiency and efficiency. Nevertheless, they do have important shortcomings. An additional, third kind of transformational strategy needs to be pursued. In the present name-giving context, one could call it the strategy of ‘consistency’. A term with a similar meaning in the current discussion is ‘industrial ecology’. Industrial ecology aims at an industrial metabolism that is consistent with nature's metabolism. The transformation of traditional industrial structures, which are often environmentally unadapted to an ecologically modernized consistent industrial metabolism, implies major or basic technological innovations, as being different from incremental efficiency increasing change. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.