4
Principle 6: The discharge of toxic substances… in such quantities or concentrations as to exceed the capacity of the environment to render them harmless must
be halted.
Slightly preceding the Stockholm conference, however, was the establishment of
the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970. Over the next several
decades, the EPA developed air and water pollution control activities seeking to
achieve the sorts of goals articulated in Stockholm’s Principle 6, creating regulatory
oversight of emissions and the implications of those emissions on human health.
The preservation of resources entered the picture with the widely read book Limits
to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972 ), but this issue, with the exception of oil, received
only passing attention in the 1970s, both by governments and corporations.
Erkman ( 1997 ) has demonstrated that several intellectual threads that eventually
became part of industrial ecology were under development in the 1970s and 1980s:
the concept of industry as an ecosystem, the quantifi cation of material and energy
fl ows, and the relationships of technology to the general economy. Japan, in particular, moved during this time toward using advanced technology to limit its demands
for materials and energy (e.g., Watanabe 1972 ; MITI 1988 ). This approach embedded industrial ecology thinking in industry to a greater degree than existed elsewhere at that time, a distinction that to some degree remains true today.
Almost 30 years after the 1972 Stockholm conference, Robert Frosch and
Nicholas Gallopoulos of the General Motors Research Laboratory published a
paper with the modest title “Strategies for Manufacturing .” In this paper, Frosch and
Gallopoulos ( 1989 ) discussed the environmental impacts of manufacturing, speculated that resource depletion and waste accumulation would be challenges in the
coming years, and provided an innovative approach to address these issues:
The traditional model of industrial activity … should be transformed into a more integrated
model: an industrial ecosystem. In such a system the consumption of energy and materials
is optimized, waste generation is minimized, and the effl uents of one process … serve as the
raw material for another.
With these words, Frosch and Gallopoulos inaugurated the fi eld of industrial
ecology.
2 Constructing the Field of Industrial Ecology
Frosch and Gallopoulos were employees of General Motors, rather than university
researchers, and were advocating an environmental ethic that went beyond complying with existing regulations. Their call to action was soon recognized as acknowledging what some corporations were already doing, or upon which they were soon
to embark. Frosch and Gallopoulos were not the only ones thinking along these lines
but were among the fi rst to put a public face on these efforts. An admittedly incomplete list of some of the most active corporations during the seminal period 1988–
1996 includes Volvo ( 1991 ; Horkeby 1997 ), 3M (Holusha 1991 ), BMW (Holusha
T.E. Graedel and R.J. Lifset
Principle 6: The discharge of toxic substances… in such quantities or concentrations as to exceed the capacity of the environment to render them harmless must
be halted.
Slightly preceding the Stockholm conference, however, was the establishment of
the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970. Over the next several
decades, the EPA developed air and water pollution control activities seeking to
achieve the sorts of goals articulated in Stockholm’s Principle 6, creating regulatory
oversight of emissions and the implications of those emissions on human health.
The preservation of resources entered the picture with the widely read book Limits
to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972 ), but this issue, with the exception of oil, received
only passing attention in the 1970s, both by governments and corporations.
Erkman ( 1997 ) has demonstrated that several intellectual threads that eventually
became part of industrial ecology were under development in the 1970s and 1980s:
the concept of industry as an ecosystem, the quantifi cation of material and energy
fl ows, and the relationships of technology to the general economy. Japan, in particular, moved during this time toward using advanced technology to limit its demands
for materials and energy (e.g., Watanabe 1972 ; MITI 1988 ). This approach embedded industrial ecology thinking in industry to a greater degree than existed elsewhere at that time, a distinction that to some degree remains true today.
Almost 30 years after the 1972 Stockholm conference, Robert Frosch and
Nicholas Gallopoulos of the General Motors Research Laboratory published a
paper with the modest title “Strategies for Manufacturing .” In this paper, Frosch and
Gallopoulos ( 1989 ) discussed the environmental impacts of manufacturing, speculated that resource depletion and waste accumulation would be challenges in the
coming years, and provided an innovative approach to address these issues:
The traditional model of industrial activity … should be transformed into a more integrated
model: an industrial ecosystem. In such a system the consumption of energy and materials
is optimized, waste generation is minimized, and the effl uents of one process … serve as the
raw material for another.
With these words, Frosch and Gallopoulos inaugurated the fi eld of industrial
ecology.
2 Constructing the Field of Industrial Ecology
Frosch and Gallopoulos were employees of General Motors, rather than university
researchers, and were advocating an environmental ethic that went beyond complying with existing regulations. Their call to action was soon recognized as acknowledging what some corporations were already doing, or upon which they were soon
to embark. Frosch and Gallopoulos were not the only ones thinking along these lines
but were among the fi rst to put a public face on these efforts. An admittedly incomplete list of some of the most active corporations during the seminal period 1988–
1996 includes Volvo ( 1991 ; Horkeby 1997 ), 3M (Holusha 1991 ), BMW (Holusha
T.E. Graedel and R.J. Lifset