Industrial and territorial ecology

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Summary

 

Introduction

The implementation of an environmental management approach must enable the integration of the environment into the development and management of the trading estate. It must also respond to business requirements by offering an adapted range of services. The idea is also to promote the consideration of the environment within businesses, for example via collective operations (joint waste collection, etc.). Furthermore, this collective approach is a pre-requisite for more ambitious and cross-sectional strategies, in line with industrial ecology approaches.
 
Industrial ecology, an alternative to the “end of pipe” approach (end-of-process treatment), proposes a systemic vision of the production system, based on the consideration of network effects and potential complementarities at economic sector and territorial level. This concept relies on the idea that the industrial system can be regarded as a specific form of natural ecosystem. Trading estates are a coherent territorial scale to test out the systematic recovery of resources: the waste, discharge or emissions of certain companies are used as secondary raw materials or energy by others. As an emerging research domain, industrial ecology opens up a new multi-disciplinary scientific and technical field, at the intersection of engineering, ecology and economy.

These approaches elicit an increasingly favourable response from those involved in trading estates. Orée coordinates a permanent working group on this subject, based on the exchange of experience and best practices, to develop methodological tools designed for economic developers, planners and in particular the managers of these trading estates and residing companies. This resulted in the publication, in 2002, of the Guide for the environmental management of trading estates as well as the creation of an interactive platform: ecocartes-za.org . Since 2005, this working group has focused on the following issue: “How to switch from collective environmental management to an industrial ecology approach in business parks?” which resulted in the publication of the “Implementing an industrial ecology approach in a business park ” guide in 2008. France’s main players in this domain have been involved in these reflections. The themes currently tackled are people’s mobility and inter-company travel plans (PDIE), the issue of services and logistics in trading estates, by integrating the principles of industrial ecology into these reflections, which will also give rise to the production of methodological supports.