Eco Parks & Environment

Industrial ecologists are championing eco-industrial park or EIPs as tools for pursuing sustainable study. An EIP is a community of companies located in one contri barelyion that exchange and make use of each others by-products or vital force. Among the best known is Kalundborg, Denmark, a city in which the major industries and the local organization trade their make off streams and energy alternatives. Many commentators see Kalundborg as a model that should be copied and improved upon. Imagine what a team of designers could come up with if they were to start from scratch, regain and specifying industries and factories that had potentially synergistic and symbiotic relationships, writes Paul Hawken (1993, 63), indite of The Ecology of Commerce. Ernest A. Lowe (1997, 58) points out that while industrial ecosystems moldiness be largely self-organizing, on that point is a substantive role for an organizing team in educating potential participants to the opportunities and in cr eating the conditions that support the development. Because of this enthusiastic endorsement, numerous EIPs have been aforethought(ip) in North and South America, Southeast Asia, europium and Southern Africa (Ayres 1996 Indigo Development 1998 Gertler 1995 Lowe 1997). Kalundborg, a shrimpy city on the island of Seeland, 75 miles west of Copenhagen, is hence an impressive example of a recycling network.In this city of 20,000, the four main industriesa coal-fired index plant (Asn?s), a refinery (Statoil), a pharmaceuticals and enzymes maker (Novo Nordisk), a plasterboard manufacturer (Gyproc), as well as the municipal government and a few small businessesfeed on each others wastes, in the wait on turning them into useful inputs. The Asn?s military unit confederacy supplies residual steam to the Statoil refinery and, in exchange, receives refinery gas that employ to be flared as waste. The power plant burn the refinery gas to generate electricity and steam.It sends excess st eam to a tip farm that it operates, to a order heating system serving 3,500 homes, and to the Novo Nordisk plant. Sludge from the fish farm and pharmaceutical processes becomes fertilizer for nearby farms. The power plant sends fly ash to a cement company, while gypsum produced by the power plants desulfurization process goes to a company that produces gypsum wallboard. Finally, the Statoil refinery removes sulfur from its natural gas and sells it to Kemira, a sulfuric acid manufacturer. However, consultants id not design, nor did Danish government officials finance, Kalundborgs industrial symbiosis. It was, rather, the result of many separate isobilateral deals between companies searching to reduce waste interference and disposal costs and to gain access to cheaper materials and energy while generating income from production residue.Kalundborg, like other alike examples, developed entirely through market forces (Garner and Keoleian 1995 Gertler 1995 Lowe et al. 1996 Schwartz and Steininger 1997). Today, there is still no higher level of government activity managing the interaction of Kalundborg companies and local government. Lowe 1997, 59). Jorgen Christensen, a spokesperson for Novo Nordisk, notes I was asked to speak on how you designed Kalundborg. We didnt design the upstanding thing. It wasnt designed at all. It happened over time (Lowe 1995, 15). This act shows that the movement toward public planning of eco-industrial parks rests on a misreading of the Kalundborg experience. Kalundborg is not unique but rather is characteristic of industrial loops that cities have fostered for hundreds and heretofore thousands of years.To assume that EIP planners can replicate and improve upon Kalundborg reflects scrimpy knowledge of how market forces have historically promoted resource recovery. This adjudicate compares private and public mechanisms in the development of industrial loops and illustrates how regulation of hazardous waste in the United Stat es currently thwarts such industrial symbiosis. The essay concludes by arguing that greater reliance on market forces would be the most effective agency of replicating the Danish experience.