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Chapter 8
The Challenge of Integration
The previous chapters examined how social movements, technology, economics and politics can link together to create industrial ecologies. In this chapter we examine how linkages can actually take place between companies and with their local community. The primary difficulty, responsibility in the product cycle , is discussed in the first section. Second, we directly apply that perspective to look at how companies can be integrated in product cycles when interactions among companies are governed primarily from the firms’ perspectives (and often from a dominant firms perspective). Then the direction is reversed to consider how a product cycle would be conceived when a community is in charge of design.
8.1 The Expandable Limits to Corporate Responsibility
One of the greatest obstacles to achieving industrial ecology is extending responsibility and control over a firm’s environmental impacts. We know that a firm can only directly control its immediate production. Thus, if it wants to take responsibility for its own directly produced air, water and land impacts it certainly can. Few firms, however, control the complete upstream and downstream activities of their product, much less control the production of all the supporting services and goods they require. Some firms may control several stages of the product cycle, such as an oil company that drills oil, transports it, refines it and distributes it. It may thus force all these stages to conform to sustainability criteria, but there are few firms that are this integrated. Even oil firms do not make the production equipment or the cars that use the oil and they certainly are not interested in selling to themselves. It is more likely that different companies or different consumers will be control at each stage of the product cycle. Manufacturers usually have complete control over that part, component, or end product they make, and some influence over suppliers, distribution channels, and in use. Retailers depend on suppliers for products and for customers to dispose of the product properly, but have significant influence over them. Few firms, anywhere in the product cycle have much control over the physical infrastructure of electricity production, sewage, roads or rails.
Figure 8.i Product Cycle Responsibility of an Automobile Manufacturer
A firm’s influences over its upstream and downstream impacts are, for the most part, indirect. If it is a large purchaser it can exert a strong influence over a supplier to improve its environmental performance or if it sells a very popular or unique product it may be able to exert a strong influence over distributors. Indeed, some environmental performance improvement programs, such as purchasing and marketing, are focused on extending a company’s influence upstream and downstream not only for primary operations, but also for supporting goods and services. And when a company practices DfE it attempts to apply an influence on the entire product cycle through the design of its product. Yet, if a company is not a large purchaser or critical supplier, or if a production stage is far from an environmentally concerned company’s influence, the control it can exert becomes more indirect and less powerful. Even if a company has practiced DfE it cannot be assured that it will obtain environmentally friendly inputs or that its products will be properly used, recycled or disposed of. In figure 8.i automobile assemblers such as Toyota or Ford are used as an example of how a firm can take responsibility throughout the product cycle. It can also be used as example to show how that responsibility becomes more limited and indirect. Automobile assemblers make only 20-30% of a car’s total composition and they can have a great deal of primary control over the environment impacts of how these parts of the car are made and the car’s assembly. Still that control is limited by the products of their suppliers are willing and capable of making. Automobile assemblers however, can have a great deal of influence over how suppliers make materials, parts and components and also over distribution through their dealer franchises, but this control is a weaker secondary nature. Farther upstream in resource extraction and materials processing, the automobile company’s influence can still be significant (e.g. getting a particular grade of steel made), however, but the influence is still a weaker tertiary level. The same can be said of an automobile company’s influence in the use, collection, and recycling stages. Through DfE, a company can design a car that can use less gasoline and can be recycled, but the car will likely have to be driven and maintained properly to get that
Resource Extraction
Materials Processing
Parts Manufacture Product Assembly
Distribution
Consumption
Materials Collection
Recycling
Material & Energy Inputs PollutionOutputs
Primary responsibility Secondary responsibility Tertiary responsibility
Social Infrastructure Industry Associations, Gov’t, NGOs, etc.
Physical Infrastructure roads, sewers, electricity, land use
From Product Cycle to Value Cycle
We have already discussed many reasons why a business would want to adopt an environmentally friendly strategy. These rationales can be grouped into three categories: 1) an ethical response to real human and ecological damage; 2) compliance with government regulations; and 3) competitive advantage. The first approach is probably the most important and most basic. Thus far, however, we have had to rely on government regulations to actually force companies to improve their environmental performance. Yet, government regulations and the other forms of external governance have not taken us to where we need to go. They need to be combined more effectively with the creation of value that the market is so effective at achieving. The values that can be created through improved environmental performance come in a diverse range of direct and indirect benefits such as those listed below.
Values Created through a Sustainable Business Strategy
o Improved product quality o Increased staff commitment o Improved community relations o Positive pressure group relations o Improved media coverage o Green products o Cheaper finance o Lower insurance and legal costs o Reduced risk exposure o Assured present and future compliance o Reduced costs because of improved materials and energy efficiency o Improved materials o Reduced cleanup and decommissioning costs
Creating these values, however, requires a more complex approach to business than simply producing a product through a linear value chain where the product is disposed of at the end and where there is little concern for the pollution and resource losses that occur at the many stages of the product cycle. It requires working with suppliers, distributors and other stakeholders of a product cycle to create an exchange of values at each linking of production and consumption and recycling. In other words there has to be some profit incentive for firms to reduce environmental impacts at each stage to compliment the product cycle with a value cycle (figure 8.ii). That may mean that firms have an incentive not to pollute or waste, or firms may have an incentive to buy and use what was once considered waste, or firms may find value in using alternative technologies, or reducing regulatory costs, or a diversity of other strategies. Thus, in order to close the loop in the product/industrial cycle money has to be made at each step of the way. Creating the value cycle would be the most likely way to ensure that firms would improve their environmental performance and would take the industrial system closer to an ecological system. The reason why there is no waste in natural ecosystems is that some organism always evolves to find value in consuming every the excrements, remains, and body of all other organisms. Similarly, in industrial ecology, the product cycle can only function on a market basis if there is a profitable exchange of value at each stage.
Creating values at each step of the value cycle, cannot however, be accomplished simply by finding resource savings or alternative uses at each stage. These sources of value creation may be limited under current market conditions and it may still be more cost effective for a firm not recycle or not to create byproducts. Furthermore it may still be cheaper to emit pollution than to capture it. The essential problem is that firms may still be able to get away with not internalizing their externalities. Achieving the conditions that allow this internalization is a complex task that requires business leaders to work more positively with external stakeholders—the government, NGOs, business associations—not simply, on the products that can be exchanged. More importantly, companies and all stakeholders must work together on the establishment of a social infrastructure of standards and regulations and other market conditions that will create the incentives for companies to turn wastes into products, to stop polluting, and to conserve energy. Underlying the creation of this formal infrastructure is a shift to a greater understanding of social and individual responsibility to the environment. Firms that have a sustainability vision realize that if they can help to shift public opinion towards environmental protection, that will help to shift the regulatory system towards the environment, and help the company to take a competitive advantage by fulfilling that need.
Figure 8.ii The Value Cycle 8.2 Corporate Industrial Ecology
Resource Extraction
Materials Processing
Parts Manufacture Product Assembly
Distribution
Consumption
Materials Collection
Recycling
Social Infrastructure Industry Associations, Gov’t, NGOs, etc.
Material & Energy Inputs
Pollution Outputs
Physical Infrastructure roads, sewers, electricity, land use, etc.
Mutual Exchange of Value
Xerox chose to lease and service its photocopiers rather than to sell them from the time of it’s founding, thereby in essence selling the photocopying function rather than the photocopier. In the early 1990s it decided to remanufacture and recycle its machines and components when they reached the end of their first life. Xerox maximizes the end-of-life potential of products and components by building the concepts of disassembly, durability, reuse and recycling into equipment design. Now, 90% of Xerox-designed equipment is remanufacturable and Xerox controls most of the product cycle. Equipment remanufacture and parts reuse/recycling prevented more than 148 million pounds of waste from entering landfills in 1999. Parts reuse also significantly reduced the use of raw materials and the energy needed to manufacture new equipment. The financial benefits of equipment remanufacture and parts reuse amount to several hundred million dollars a years. Xerox also designed in reductions in hazardous materials, chemicals, noise and energy saving features that saved 387 million kilowatt hours. The closed loop system was first tested on copy/print cartridges and then extended to three other hardware supplies programs. For these programs, prepaid postage labels and packaging allow customers to return old products to Xerox for reuse and recycling. Xerox is not responsible for the whole product cycle as it buys raw materials and components from other firms and because some returned materials are sold to be recycled by other firms. Strategically, these pioneer programs have put Xerox well placed to profit from the more stringent take-back and packaging laws introduced in Europe and Japan. One difficulty, however, was convincing customers that the remanufactured products perform as well as the new ones. That difficulty has been overcome with a 100% satisfaction guarantee.
Figure 8.iii Xerox’s solutions based business model
8.2.ii Product Stewardship
Product stewardship is usually defined in very broad terms. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) describes product stewardship as calling on all those in the product life cycle, including manufacturers, retailers, users, disposers, and governments, to share responsibility for reducing the environmental impacts of products. The emphasis is however on a business doing something in the design of its products to ensure environmental impacts are controlled and minimized from “cradle to grave.” It thus includes not only a firm’s direct responsibility, but also the product’s upstream and downstream impacts. The US EPA description of product stewardship, however, is a voluntary effort of all participants in the product cycle. Although a firm can try to exert influence downstream on its suppliers or try to educate its users, it does not stipulate new forms of proprietary or regulatory control, and cannot ensure the reduction of the impacts that the product was designed for.
The term product stewardship is useful to describe the fundamental commitment of a firm to design its products so that they reduce the environmental impacts wherever they are used in the product cycle. Ethical responsibility is taken, but the company leaves the actual use of the product to the discretion of the buyer. Product design will consider reducing any downstream and upstream impacts it can have, but the firm does not try to take control over any of the other stages of the product cycle. This is the dominant form of entry into the product cycle as most firms must rely on downstream companies to provide environmentally enhanced materials, products, and services and on upstream users to use and recycle their products responsibly. As can be seen in the example below, however, the product stewardship entry into the product cycle still enables a company to exert a powerful influence on the environment:
Proctor and Gamble is the world’s largest consumer products company making things such as: diapers, feminine protection products, laundry detergents, fabric softeners, paper towels and tissues. Its primary focus is designing high performance, high value products that use the least amount of materials possible--to get "more from less." In regard to downstream influence, P&G only buys wood products coming from sustainably managed forests and that all pulp purchased is from either Elemental Chlorine Free (ECF) or Totally Chlorine Free (TCF) purification processes. Nor does the company use any CFCs. The company also does extensive research on the impact of its products when they have been disposed of down the drain, released into the atmosphere, burned or buried. P&G’s research and product design are based on providing consumer products that cause no harmful effects in the environment. The company does not, however, get involved in recycling activities, believing that should be the responsibility of local institutions.
8.2.iii Extended Product Responsibility (EPR)
Extended Product Responsibility is requiring a company to deal with its product or packaging at the end of its product life. Its meaning is easily conveyed by the term ‘take-back law,’ that is, a company must take-back its product and/or packaging when the customer has finished using it. EPR was initiated as a legal requirement by European governments to deal with the problem of rapidly increasing solid waste problems. Municipalities had conventionally dealt with solid waste, but EPR was set up to force companies take responsibility for this problem. EPR has two main impacts:
recycling plants itself. It organizes the collection, sorting and recycling of packaging with the support of 416 waste management partners. The objectives of the company are to prevent excess packaging and to recycle packaging.
The key to the organization is the licensing of companies to use the green dot on their products. Products with the green dot will be accepted by collection and sorting companies free of charge. Consumers have to pay disposal costs for packaging that does not have the green dot on it. The company is funded by 600 shareholders from industry and trade and more than 19,000 licensees (package fillers, importers, packaging manufacturers or trading companies) use the Green Dot. In that way, the separate collection, sorting and – in the case of plastics – recycling of sales packaging is financed and made possible. Licence fees and hence company turnover amounted to around DM 4 billion in 2000 and the company employs around 381 employees at its headquarters. In 2000, German consumers collected a total of 5,671,647 tonnes of used sales packaging manufactured from glass, paper/cardboard, plastics, tinplate, aluminium and composites in containers marked with the Green Dot. This corresponds to a collection quantity of 78.3 kilogrammes per person.
How the Dual System works
Collection systems There are two basic types of collection systems for post-consumer packaging: The kerbside system and the bring system. In the kerbside system, packaging manufactured from plastics, composites, aluminium and tinplate is collected in yellow bins or yellow bags and picked up from households by Dual System waste management partners. Paper is also collected kerbside in many regions.
In the bring system, consumers take collected packaging to recycling stations or containers that have been set up near their homes. Glass - sorted according to colour - and paper/cardboard are mainly collected in this way. At regular intervals, the containers are emptied or picked up by the Dual System waste management partners and transported to sorting or preparation plants. For lightweight packaging alone, there are around 250 sorting plants in which the waste is sorted into beverage cartons, aluminium, tinplate and plastics (generally subdivided into bottles, films, polystyrene and mixed plastics).
Forwarding for recycling The waste management companies market the sorted recyclables and pass on the quantities to the so-called acceptance and recycling guarantors who verify that the materials have been recycled. Materials that are not marketed by the waste management companies themselves are forwarded for recycling by the guarantors. These guarantors are either the manufacturing industries themselves or companies have been specially established for the recycling of secondary raw materials.
Financing The waste management services of the Dual System are financed by the licence fees paid by the manufacturers or retailers for the use of the Green Dot. The fee structure takes account of the actual waste management costs and is governed by the material used, the weight of the packaging and the number of items.
Proof of compliance The German packaging law sets collection and sorting targets for post-consumer sales packaging. Proof that these have been fulfilled must be provided on an annual basis. In the so-called mass flow verification, the Dual System provides the environment ministries of the German federal states with proof that the packaging has been properly collected, sorted and recycled.
8.2.iv Demand Side Management
Demand side management (DSM) is a model that has been developed for and used primarily by utilities, especially electric utilities. Like the leasing mode, the idea is to reduce the sale of product, but still capture profits for the company. In the case of utilities, the producer helps the customer (i.e. the demand side) to reduce their costs and improve the performance of their purchased electricity, water, or other good. The methods to help customers control their energy use are numerable, including: better ways to insulate and seal buildings, control and upgrade appliances and lighting systems, better HVAC (heating, ventilation, air-conditioning) systems, windows to control heat loss and gain and light, and so on. There are many ways for the producer to benefit from this reduction in sales. The producer may profit directly from this by, for example, extending the value of their investments (and not have to take on the cost of investing in for example new sources of power generation, power purchases, and transmission and distribution capacity additions) or by load leveling (shifting sales to non-peak production times). The producer may also benefit by receiving a proportion of the gains reaped by the customer for the changes that have been introduced. The benefits that can be reaped from these DSM strategies are such that many utilities give rebate customers for the purchase of new appliances or to retrofit their buildings.
DSM was developed in the US in the early 1990s. By the turn of the century, well over 1000 utilities in the US and Europe have developed DSM programs and billions of dollars have been spent on them. In Hong Kong, both Hong Kong Electric and China Light and Power have DSM programs. These were initiated at the demand of the Hong Kong government, but some programs have been extended. Examples of CLP’s programs are: An information and education program that has entered over 1000 schools and introduced a few hundred thousand students to energy efficiency; Construction of a HK $5.5 million energy efficiency center at the Hong Kong Science Museum; Subsidized pilot lighting programs in commercial and residential buildings; Developed DSM programs for a hotel, manufacturing company, an estates management company and a 24 hour convenience store; Developed ice-storage systems to load level and reduce customer HVAC costs.
8.2.v Investing in Natural Capital
Investing in natural capital takes corporate responsibility past the level of just minimizing the damage that the business does to the environment through the lifecycle. It seeks to restore the planets ecology to a level closer to its natural state—the level before it was rundown by industrial activities. Some companies have found a way to
the same GHG reductions than through internal changes; the arrangement of them can be changed from time to time; investments into a program can be shared by several players to make the program viable; and several suppliers of offset opportunities have developed and this reduces transaction costs. At the same time a company can announce that it is progressing towards or has become carbon neutral, and therefore use the program to enhance its brand image. Furthermore, the programs can have real environmental and economic benefits (e.g. by providing alternative energy in developed countries), but they can also be criticized as a quick fix that allows companies to avoid internal changes and can incur accusations of greenwash. Companies such as Nike and HSBC use carbon offsets.
References
On Website: Extended Product Responsibility (US EPA): eprbrochure.pdf Extended Product Responsibility- a manual for governments (OECD): OECD_EPR.pdf Servicizing: the quiet transition to extended product responsibility: servicizing.pdf The Role of Economics in extended product responsibility: RFF-Eco_in_EPR.pdf Leasing: a step to producer responsibility: Leasing.pdf
8.3 Community Industrial Ecologies
Attempts to design an industrial ecology based on a corporate product lifecycle will often make some recognition of the various externalities involved in things such as electricity generation, transportation or habitat destruction. Usually, however, it is difficult to do much about those impacts because of the transaction costs involved. The most problematic of these transaction costs are the difficulties of gathering information on upstream activities to do LCA and DfE, and of monitoring and enforcing companies after they become involved in a green purchasing plan. These difficulties are compounded with how far in the product cycle a company is distanced from the company doing DfE. The corporate focused vision of the product cycle limits also limits the view of how to reduce the impacts of infrastructure and land use.
Most importantly, there is a limited perspective of how sustainability can be promoted by changes to infrastructures such as roads, railways, communication, energy, water, sewage, garbage disposal and recycling facilities; to the land-use zoning that largely determines their composition and impacts; or the potential reduction in impacts that could be achieved through synergies of private, institutional and residential physical infrastructure. For many companies, their greatest environmental impact may directly result from how they use these infrastructures. This is especially true in the service industry where hotels, office blocks, bus companies, railway lines, freight forwarders and so on depend on these infrastructures to provide their services. It is also true in the manufacturing industry where all producers need these infrastructures to get inputs and outputs to and away from their company. Because corporate industrial ecologies usually ignore these implications, we explore the concept of community
industrial ecologies as an opportunity to generate radical reductions in environmental impact.
The community product cycle is designed by groups of people who share a common goal to reduce their environmental impact in the most efficient manner for their situation. Rather than reacting to the products that are sold in their communities by companies who design products for mass markets, and whose products may not fit into local environmental conditions, recycling capacities, or which may require extensive infrastructure demands, these communities design their own products and industrial organization in accordance with their particular environment in mind. These products may be a consumer good such as food, clothing, buildings or cars, or a service such as transportation, accommodation, and living amenities.
The primary distinction between corporate industrial ecologies and the community industrial ecologies is a much greater emphasis on community control of the parameters of environmental impact. The product is expected to accommodate itself to local infrastructures, rather than the other way around. For example, detergents and many other household consumption items need to be fitted to local sewage capacities. More durable goods—everything from paper to computers—need to be fit to regional recycling capacities and markets for recycled materials. Stronger gains are to be made by designing systems to meet the functionality of the community rather than to meet the functionality of the product. Chapter 5 illustrated some potential for community based functionality by comparing attempts to reduce the environmental impacts of transportation based on internal combustion cars, fuel cell cars, public transport, and the mixing of residences, commerce and industry.
A real challenge for companies is to go beyond just fitting into and reforming the existing system, but to create new industrial ecologies that will have the double benefits of improving peoples’ lives and dramatically helping the environment. Companies are not very far along in working toward these industrial ecologies. They will need all the environmental improvement skills that we have previously looked and develop new ones to meet this challenge. In particular, companies will need to learn to proactively support and build physical and social infrastructures when they make their environmental improvement programs and to learn how they can develop them together with government, industry associations, and NGOs.
The objective of community industrial ecologies, thus, is to find the most direct way of obtaining the desired service or function, while decreasing the energy and material throughput in the economy. It shows a way to achieve industrial ecologies in a wholistic manner that takes into consideration many related aspects of a regional economy. Thus far we seem to be approaching community industrial ecologies from two directions: from within industry itself and from a modification of planning to include more community participation. We will explore these two main trends in turn, while considering the components from which these community industrial ecologies can be made.
8.3.i Private Sector Based Industrial Ecologies
gypsum is sold to GYPROC for plasterboard products for the building industry and is is more uniform and cleaner than natural gypsum. Biomass : Enzyme production at Novo Nordisk/Novozymes is based on fermentation of such raw materials as potato flour and corn starch; Resulting biomass used by West Zealand farmers to fertilise fields. Surplus yeast from insulin production is used as animal feed. Liquid fertilizer : Sulphur dioxide removed from the flue gas is used in the production of liquid fertilizer - around 20.000 tonnes a year - which roughly correspond to the Danish annual consumption. Fly ash : Fly ash is removed from the flue gas at 70.000 tonnes a year to be used in the building industry, most for cement production. Sludge : Sludge from the public water treatment plant in Kalundborg is utilized at A/S Bioteknisk Jordrens as a nutrient in the bioremediation process.
Co-location, or the close location of several firms together is an important part of Kalundborg’s industrial ecology. Co-location allows the sharing of downgraded, but still useful energy such as steam or warm water, and also reduces the transportation costs of sharing other material residuals such as sludge or flyash. In addition to economizing on production costs, co-location also reduces transaction costs involved in discovering suppliers, negotiating, and monitoring. Co-location has been used as the key idea in the design of many new eco-industrial parks and the redesign of older industrial areas. None of the new areas, however, have been able to duplicate the success of Kalundborg. The special conditions at Kalundborg include: firms that produce a homogenous large scale output of a single material and firms that have a need for such output; stable-long term relationships between these interdependent firms; regulatory administration that both encouraged environmental improvements and allowed companies the flexibility to achieve it; evolution over time; profitable conditions based on the factors above. These special conditions allowed Kalundborg to overcome the problems that beset other attempts to co-locate firms for industrial ecologies, such as: The difficulty of matching residual supplying firms with firms that can use those residuals. This is particularly difficult outside of continuous production industries where processing and waste materials can be produced in smaller batches and be mixed in composition; Achieving stability among business relations within the eco-industrial park (e.g. some firms may go out of business or change their processes) or achieving enough redundancy among firms to achieve this stability; Developing a regulatory structure appropriate to support co-location; Based on the above, develop the profitable conditions for exchange among the firms.
Although immediate co-location such as at Kalundborg has been difficult to replicate in other settings, the lessons learned from Kalundborg have been effectively applied to a wider regional setting that provides less obstacles in terms of matching
partners and initiating appropriate policy and regulations. In the German industrial district of Rhine-Neckar for example, most waste products can be re-consumed within a region. The region offers economies of scale and diversity of markets missing in eco-industrial parks and offers transport and transparency efficiencies lacking in extra-regional waste disposal. Table 13.i replicates the advantages and disadvantages of recycling at a regional scale. Many of the disadvantages have been overcome by developing institutions that brought public, academic, and private stakeholders together in mutual trust and providing them with a transparent information base that allowed them to explore new opportunities. Critical to the system was the development of software tools that allowed participants to standardize, automate and facilitate information exchange among each other. This system allowed the regional actors to interact directly because it allowed them to recognize local opportunities that had been obscured by the actions of nationwide or multinational waste recyclers.
Table 8.i: Advantages and Disadvantages of Regional Recycling in Rhine-Neckar Additional advantages of the regional Scale
Disadvantages of the regional scale (as compared to eco-industrial park) Greater number and variety of actors
- Increase in supply and demand
- Increase in potential partners for direct output-input relations between producers
- Increase in redundancy
Greater distance between actors
- Rise in the costs of overcoming spatial and mental distances
- Rise in the variety of interests
- Increase in the complexity of logistic questions and concepts Greater Economies of Scale
- Greater price effects
- Rise in economic viability of recycling processes
- Creation of new recycling pathways
- Greater significance of indirect communication
- Rise in complexity of communication
- Rise in the costs of communication
- Necessity of a central and institutionalized structure for the coordination of information Comprehensive transparency of material flows
- Greater untilization of existing recycling capacities
- Increase in knowledge concerning a possible creatio or extension of recycling capacities
- Easier and greater supply of secondary raw materials
- Rise in disposal security
- Visualization and calculation of niches for new recycling specialists
- Establishment of additional possibilities which can contribute to a rise in regional sustainability
Greater demand for sophisticated electronic database instruments
- Rise in the costs of systems maintenance
- Rise in the required know-how
Source: Sterr and Ott 2004 p. 955.
8.3.ii Planning Based Industrial Ecologies
Planning plays a dominant role in determining the potential for sustainable futures because it is one of the few government or social activities with the legal mandate to do wholistic design. Planning is a legally empowered way of determining what activities will be undertaken in what places, the infrastructures that will carry people, goods, and information in and out of places, what regard is paid to nature, and
center. Zoning is the legal designation of what types of activities can go on in what areas. Planning throughout much of the 20th^ century tended to separate different types of activities, especially polluting industries from residential and commercial. Zoning was also used to separate different social classes and races from each other. In most places, a significant outcome of both market driven and zoned land use patterns has been a spatial separation of different urban activities which has worsened the environmental impacts of infrastructure use. A challenge is to overcome this unwanted effect. Primary, Manufacturing, Commercial and Residential Activities: As stated previously many of these activities have become spatially separated. Primary activities such as forestry, mining, and farming are usually kept to a distance because of pollution and because their low returns to land use. Similarly, from the late 20th^ century manufacturing, because of health and amenity concerns, has been relegated to zoned areas of cities. Increasingly, as among the regions of a country and especially globally increases, much of primary and manufacturing activity occurs far from a particular city and it is distanced from the sources of its ecological footprint. There is some mixing of the remaining commercial and residential functions, but still because of differences in rents paid for land in each type of area and amenity concerns, different types of commercial activities (e.g. finance, retail, warehousing) or residential (apartments, low rise, luxury) spatial separation still dominates. Energy: Existing energy provision is characterized by the use of fossil fuels that must be imported from distant locations and which are polluting when used locally. Alternatives involve not only renewables such as solar, photovoltaic, hydrogen, biomass, wind, tide, or geothermal, but also distributed energy sources such as small scale gas turbines. Another very important energy concern is simply the vast potential of energy conservation through more efficient use and power conserving devices. Transportation and Communication: Transportation infrastructure, such as roads, railways, subways, ports, airports, and sewers make up a large percentage of the urban land space, and impact the environment greatly through the destruction of habitat, enormous needs for materials and energy in manufacture and construction, and pollution in use and decommissioning. Roads and other space required by cars, require in most cities from 30-60 percent of the total surface area. Fixed lines for communication, either overhead or underneath also requires substantial infrastructure. The greater the degree of spatial separation of activities the greater will be the demand for these types of infrastructures. There are also concerns about the amounts of individualized (car) traffic as compared to public, bicycle or pedestrian mobility. The freedom of individual and efficient mobility, for economic and social reasons, is recognized as important basis of social sustainability. Buildings and Facilities: Buildings use up huge amounts of materials and energy in manufacture, use, and decommissioning. In North American cities they account for about 40 percent of all embodied energy (expended in manufacture of cement etc.) and in the use of lights, heating, air conditioning etc. In Hong Kong, we can expect the share of energy use of buildings to be significantly higher, because of the relatively lower energy consumption of transportation and manufacturing. Other facilities with special impacts are sewage treatment plants, landfills and incinerators, water filtration plants and so on. These can be located outside of the urban area but at financial and environmental cost.
Economic and Social Benefits: Most urban plans are developed to deliver some sort of economic or social benefit to local people. Foremost among these are employment and income increases. The provision of housing is also an important concern. Usually these concerns will be central to the policy behind plans, but other concerns such as nature preservation or quality of life are increasingly being integrated into the plans as synergistic elements, rather than simply being added on as complimentary amenities. Coordination and Governance: Planning can conceptually bring all these components together, but it also must allow for a great deal of freedom for business, NGO, government and other actions, not only to bring the design to realization, but to maintain its evolution. To coordinate these activities motivations have to be understood and the appropriate incentives and disincentives created, implemented and enforced. Planning therefore must be compliment by diverse government policies, legislation and management.
It is possible to reduce the environmental impact of all these separate planning components, however, greater impact reduction will be obtainable if the interrelations and synergies between the different components are taken advantage of. Furthermore, primary concern within, and especially among these components is there spatial separation. Achieving industrial ecologies from these interrelations is a complex effort, but it could have the following results:
- Conscious mapping of resource (energy, materials, waste, water, etc.) flows at a city and regional level;
- Coordinated development of government activities, residential patterns, industry sectors, technologies and individual companies to maximize resource synergies;
- Minimization of imports of materials, exports of wastes and long distance movement of part-finished goods; and
- Encouraging businesses to locate near their workforces, suppliers, customers, and other businesses with synergies (Socolow in Selman 2000, 238).
Planning encourages these synergies by setting out the parameters of land use and interactions within an area and between areas. The most obvious ways of increasing these synergies are to increase density and mixing of use. Increasing the density of use automatically reduces the distances and infrastructure needed for transferal of materials, goods, waste and people. Density also increases the viability of district sharing heat and air conditioning systems, homogenous quantities and collection of waste for recycling, water reuse, etc. Mixing of residential, commercial, and manufacturing activities would reduce the need for transportation to work, allow more sharing of residual heating or cooling supplies, and provide variety in the types and quantities of materials for recycling. Density, also, provides challenges because it creates an intensity of pollution effects in terms of air, water, noise, landfill, and heat, that it is hard to dissipate in a small area. Similarly, the use of mixing depends on achieving means to make land uses such as manufacturing and residential compatible with each other. Densification of cities is usually promoted as an antidote to the sprawl of low density suburban residential areas that not only take up great amounts of what was natural or farm land but also incur huge costs and environmental impacts because of road expansion for cars and other facilities like sewers, electricity, and telecommunications. Other lower density options, however, can be built in symbiosis with the natural landscape to take advantage of nature’s capacity for cleaning waste,
