Industrial Ecology: Minimizing the Impact of Industrial Waste

NOV 01, 1994

With the environment in jeopardy, we need to reconsider the design of products and the organization of industrial and consumer markets with recycling in mind.

DOI: 10.1063/1.881405

Robert A. Frosch

Throughout human history, industry has been an open system of materials flow. People took natural plant, animal and mineral materials and transformed them into tools, clothing and other products of all kinds. When materials were left over from the production process or worn out, they were thrown aside—dumped in the backyard, as it were. Archaeologists find deposits of discarded materials—scrap stone, flints and potsherds—in the rubbish dumps of the Neolithic. Habitations were often moved because the waste that people had piled around them had rendered the old location an unsuitable place to live.

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More about the authors

Robert A. Frosch, Harvard University's, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Cambridge, Massachusetts.