Eco-industrial Strategies: Unleashing Synergy Between Economic Development and the Environment

Old-style manufacturing, embodied in industrial parks that litter the landscape, may soon become dinosaurs of industrial development. These Jurassic Parks of the past will be replaced by new eco-industrial parks (EIPs) that link manufacturers more closely together into an industrial ecosystem for business and environmental excellence. Companies have always depended on a larger ecology of suppliers, customers, geography and market to be successful, but a popular mythology was that each company was an island. Abandoning this fantasy by consciously integrating into a larger industrial ecology is smart business that draws on the overall system of interactions to nourish corporate success-and the environment.