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Sustainable development is not a simple, singular and well-tested path. It needs an interdisciplinary examination of resource use patterns, ecological heritage, demographics and cultural values. Industrial ecology, owing to its emphasis on using a holistic approach, can provide a valuable platform to draw out sustainable strategies and policies for developing countries to implement. It can offer a paradigm within which IE methods and tools can inform responses to local development challenges. Within this paradigm, sustainable industrial, rural and urban development strategies and policies in developing countries should follow from IE research and analyses.

A SWOT analysis of IE in developing countries highlights strengths of high economic growth and threats from outdated policies and inadequate industrial ecology awareness in the policy making and governing spheres. Examination of the IPAT equation in the context of developing countries highlights the role that new technological hubs such as China and India can play, the significance of increasing affluence among “new consumers” in the developing world and the role of population in managing resources sustainably.

Research in IE since its introduction to the global south around the mid-1990s has primarily focused on two concepts of IE – cleaner production and eco-industrial parks – largely due to the impetus of development organizations. Other studies using the IE lens and tools have shown the potential of the IE paradigm in developing countries. These studies have highlighted the importance of focussing on scarce resources such as water, examining the possibilities of using well-tested technologies and evaluating the long-term maintenance of new technologies and practices before recommending their implementation. New policies in the developing world can gain from the IE community in terms of assistance in simplifying and downsizing data requirements, application of solutions to contemporary sustainability challenges and framing effective policies based on IE concepts.

Material flow analysis (MFA, also known as Material Flow Accounting) has become one of the basic tools in industrial ecology, since its pioneering development by Ayres. This chapter reviews progress in MFA with emphasis on the use of MFA to support waste management and recycling policy.

Waste statistics are compiled in most developed and some developing countries, but the basis is insufficiently standardized so that care is needed in making comparisons between countries. This also applies to recycling flows, which are difficult to define and quantify. Waste arising from demolition can be predicted by dynamic modeling which also predicts future resource demand, but the discrepancies between predicted and reported waste quantities can be large due to “missing” or “dissipated” stock. Metals represent an important and valuable component of waste; metals in end-of-life vehicles and e-waste in particular need to be quantified for their recycling and ecological and human health impact assessment. MFA has also been applied to international trade of secondhand products containing metals. MFA studies on phosphorus have revealed potential ways to increase recovery that go beyond recycling from obvious wastes. Analysis of stocks must be an important topic in coming decades.

Policies designed to move the economy towards “circularity” have been promoted in some countries, including China and Japan, as practical manifestations of the industrial ecology paradigm. In China, the link to MFA was only recognized some years after the introduction of the policy, whereas in Japan MFA was accepted from the outset.

Measures are being advocated, for example by the OECD, to improve the comparability of MFA across different data sources. Input-output analysis is increasingly applied to estimate and represent material flows. In general, MFA has matured to the point where it is now mandated as a tool for national and international policy. But further expansion and integration are expected.

This chapter sets out the European policy origins of ‘circular economy’ thinking in the UK and discusses the extent to which the waste prevention plans written by the four countries of the UK (to fulfill the EU requirement) start to move the UK in the direction of more circular approaches. This is important for an understanding of what has driven UK action on this agenda. I argue that the ‘circular economy’ has become an increasingly vigorous topic of debate in the UK. This has been manifested mainly through interest and use of the language by leading companies, but more recently also through political interest in Scotland and Wales, resulting in diverging policies in the countries of the UK. Heightened political interest in some parts of the UK has coincided with uncertainty about activity in the European Commission. The chapter discusses some of the difficulties in turning the concept into policy prescriptions.

This chapter explores how industrial ecology concepts and tools were used to support the design of waste management systems and policies in Portugal. The focus is on a set of case studies that illustrate the results of a successful cooperation between government, private institutions, and academia to transform waste into a useful resource for socio-economic development.

The “Relvão Eco Industrial Park”, an industrial symbiosis case study, is analyzed, showing that it was possible to build from scratch a large number of synergies between companies, creating over 300 local jobs and attracting an investment of over €19 million to a region which was industrially undeveloped.

The partnership between the Portuguese Environment Agency and IST to develop the National Waste Management Plan enabled design of a policy instrument that explicitly identified the need for a life-cycle approach to underpin waste management policies and that supported a circular economy to contribute to increasing resource efficiency.

The recent national strategy for urban waste management (PERSU 2020), developed in 2014, is the latest case study of cooperation between academia and the government to develop a public policy whose results show that the proposed changes will lead to a major qualitative leap in the environmental and economic performance of the sector by 2020. It is estimated that the net GHG emissions will be reduced by 47 %, as demonstrated by an LCA study promoted to support policy development. These benefits are due not only to reduction of the quantity sent to landfill, especially the biodegradable fractions, but also to the expected increase in MSW recycling resulting from the increase of selective collection and more efficient treatment and recovery of mixed wastes. An hybrid input-output model, i.e. with both monetary and mass flows, that explicitly considers seven types of waste, showed that the new policy will allow for increasing the economic added value of the urban waste management system by 26 % to €451million and that the number of direct and indirect jobs will increase to 13,000 and 5,500, respectively.

The evidence reported in this chapter shows that the cooperation between government, academia and private sector in Portugal, based on industrial ecology principles and tools, has been able to significantly improve waste management performance in Portugal since the late 1990s, making the sector an important actor of the green economy, by combining better environmental performance with economic growth and job creation, critical dimensions for enabling sustainable development.

Unilever is a leading example of a multinational company in the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) sector. Unilever has long been an advocate of sustainable business, using scientific assessment as the basis for its strategy and initiatives. Given its business, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is established within the company and there is a current focus on improving the methodology and scope of LCA. Recent developments include new approaches to fill data gaps for agricultural ingredients and new impact assessment methods for assessing land use change. We have also adapted LCA approaches to inform corporate strategy and to engage a broad range of stakeholders both within the company and outside. The most recent and significant example of this has been the use of product footprinting as an integral element of Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan (USLP); currently over 2000 products are footprinted annually across 14 countries.

LCA approaches will continue to play an important role in Unilever’s strategy. However, there is an urgent need to develop more predictive, regional/global level approaches that take into account the limited availability of many earth resources, the non-linearity of certain impacts and the absolute limits of sustainability. Several conceptual systems-level frameworks and theories already exist, but the Planetary Boundary (PB) approach has been selected as the most promising for developments in data, modelling and contextualization of environmental assessment. We have identified the need for developments in informatics to exploit new data gathering approaches as well as new modelling initiatives utilizing Geographical Information Systems (GIS) mapping and ‘big data’ approaches. In particular, we see real value in developing a distinct and novel, ‘PB-enabled’ normative LCA approach to support product/service/sectorial decision-making.

A number of approaches to industrial ecology are now employed within environmental legislation, targeting products at various stages of their life-cycle. These require producers to reduce the hazardous substances content of their products during production, increase product energy efficiency during use, and organise and finance improved recycling and treatment of their products at end of life (Extended Producer Responsibility, or ‘EPR’). Such requirements are increasingly commonplace in the Americas, Eurasia, and Pacific Rim countries and have substantial impact. If companies can’t comply, then they can’t sell their products. There appears to be little research on the practical steps producers have taken to manage compliance with this new-wave of product-based requirements, as compared to the more established areas of environmental management addressing site-based air and water emissions, resource and energy use, and waste management. Based on a number of case studies, this chapter explains how such product-based legislation operates in practice.

Hewlett Packard discusses how companies can move from the conceptual ambiguity of the circular economy to operational reality. The development of the circular economy concept is described, in particular the extension from resource efficiency: the importance of moving from the idea of ‘consumers’ to ‘users’. Transitioning from a linear economy to a circular one will require disruptive innovation. For more than 30 years, HP technologies have led large scale changes in a wide range of markets. We describe how HP is designing products and services which meet and enable circular economy applications. The examples demonstrate how a major multinational company like HP can build on its long-held resource efficiency principles to profitably drive industry forward in the circular economy. It is clear that the ‘new style of IT’ enables many future and current circular economy initiatives, from car sharing; community garden/power tool sharing and developing further connections between networks – i.e. the ‘sharing economy’. The ‘internet of things’ has huge potential to retain and grow control over dispersed resources. Through collaborative technologies and partnerships, and by engaging the innovation potential of others, HP looks to lead the proliferation of full system solutions that can allow inventors and communities to design and innovate surpassing what can be imagined today.

For the last 100 years, virtually every automobile was an internal combustion vehicle (ICV) powered by either gasoline or diesel and mostly made from steel. Even as the ICV was identified as a source of serious environmental impact, it continued to outcompete others, arguably more environmentally benign, transportation modes. Banning lead from gasoline, requiring catalytic converters, and increasing powertrain efficiency allowed the ICV to respond to environmental criticism and continue its dominance over other transportation technologies. Today, well over one billion ICVs are in use worldwide.

Since the turn of the last century, however, this dominance is beginning to be contested, not so much from other transportation modes but from alternative automotive designs and fuels, such as biofuels, lightweight materials, and fuel cell, hybrid, and battery electric powertrains. All of these alternatives are meant to decrease the environmental impacts of cars, but in all cases there is concern about trade-offs, unintended consequences, and regrettable substitutions. This chapter discusses history and recent developments of automobiles from an industrial ecology perspective. Such a perspective is necessary to determine the extent to which the emerging automotive technologies can genuinely reduce rather than simply shift the environmental impacts of automobiles.

The Humber region, in North East England, is a major hub of industrial activity and trade. It has seen applications of industrial symbiosis for many years, initially centred on ‘top-down’ infrastructure projects with large capital investment but subsequently following a ‘bottom-up’ approach engaging industries in the area. Reductions in GHG emissions and waste generation have already been impressive. The possibilities for further savings, recognising the European Union’s aspirations for deep GHG cuts and the objectives of the A.SPIRE partnership involving 114 stakeholders from the process industries in Europe, have been explored in the LOCIMAP (low-carbon industrial manufacturing parks) project, which involved partners from across Europe. Industrial symbiosis has been central in the plans for LOCIMAP from the outset. Studies conducted for LOCIMAP have revealed that more substantial savings require industrial symbiosis to be designed in, rather than developed once facilities exist. Major further savings depend on co-location of activities in eco-industrial parks to enable systematic process integration, but following this approach raises further questions, including:

The project has shown that we have the engineering ability to achieve deep reductions in energy use and GHG emissions provided industries can be located in eco-industrial parks with interactions designed according to thermodynamic principles. Barriers to realising this concept, to achieve a new industrial revolution, include an economic and fiscal system which means that design for optimal economic performance leads to different outcomes from designing for optimal environmental performance.