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Title: Ecology and Industry
Author: Anarchist Communist Federation
Date: 1997
Language: en
Topics: Ecology, industry, Organise!
Source: Retrieved on May 13, 2013 from https://web.archive.org/web/20130513181301/http://www.afed.org.uk/org/issue45/ecoind.html
Notes: Published in Organise! Issue 45 — Spring 1997.

Anarchist Communist Federation

Ecology and Industry

A decisive collision looms. On one side is the ‘grow-or-die’ industry of

Capitalism, lurching out of control. On the other, the fragile

conditions known as the biosphere necessary for the maintenance of

advanced life forms on this planet. Does there have to be one or the

other? Ecologists, economists and sociologists are beginning to find

common ground between ecology and industry, and discovering that by

working together and abolishing the ‘grow-or-die’ aspect of industry, a

sustainable future may really be possible.

The vision of whole networks of industries, each efficiently feeding off

others by-products to eliminate waste and pollution, like natural

ecosystems may not be as idealistic as it once seemed. Harmful emissions

wouldn’t just be curbed to a governments (un)acceptable level, they’d be

abolished completely. In ecosystems, materials flow cyclically from

producers (plants) to consumers (animals), and recycled by decomposers

(fungi, microbes) and scavengers (vultures, hyenas and so on).

Everything is put to use and the concept of ‘waste’ is meaningless. In

the present Capitalist industries by severe contrast, materials move in

a linear fashion from manufacturer to consumer and then straight into

the air or into a dump. ‘Waste’ is essentially a human invention.

Industrial ecology aims to ‘close the loop’; making waste and pollution

obsolete. This requires industries to recycle more resources, use raw

materials to the full and create as few unwanted by-products as

possible. However, big business executives are more concerned with

getting a stable supply of materials of consistent quality than

accepting the by-product of the industry next door. It demands a shift

in thinking. Products need to be seen not as the end of the line, but as

temporary embodiments of materials. Curbing industrial emissions to

‘zero’ may not be possible for as long as industry continues to use

fossil fuels. Nature’s ecosystems are powered by the Sun, while we burn

fossil fuels, and that, inevitably produces greenhouse gases including

carbon dioxide. The difficulty in eliminating or recycling such

emissions means that there will always be some pollution and waste. But

this needn’t deter us from trying to cut waste as much as we can now.

In Kalundborg, Denmark — a seaside town of 10,000 — everyone knows about

‘industrial symbiosis’. A coal-fired power station pumps steam heat,

which would normally be lost energy, into an oil refinery, a drugs

company and to the town. Additional recovered heat goes to a nearby fish

farm. Gypsum created by the power plants scrubber is sold to a local

plasterboard manufacturer which also uses the refinery’s light gas,

normally burnt off as waste, to fire its ovens for drying the wallboard.

The refinery pumps its cooling water to the power plant for use in

cleaning as boiler feedwater. Organic sludge from the fish farm and

drugs company, where microbes are cultured, provides fertiliser for

farmers’ fields.

Perhaps the most perfectly balanced, but frequently forgotten and

overlooked, example of industrial ecology is that of crop rotation in

agriculture, a system that is ages old and yet rarely employed by the

factory farms of today.

Information and education is the key to success for industrial ecology,

expensive new technologies are not. If it is so relatively easy to

create eco-industrial parks then why aren’t we seeing such complexes

sprouting up like mushrooms? Many people find it difficult to envisage

systems, rather than linear mechanical set-ups. Companies are accustomed

to focusing on a ‘core’ business strategy, namely making profit, that

prevents them from considering other opportunities.

The growth pattern that capitalism necessarily follows is neither

ecologically or economically sustainable. It is creating a high cost of

living and a low quality of life. The only resource which we posses in

virtual abundance is that of human potential, and yet it is a resource

which is squandered with even greater profligacy than the whole of the

Earth’s finite resources. It is time humanity used ecological knowledge

and applied it to create a society worth living in, one based on

equality between people and harmony with the rest of nature.The

supposedly unavoidable conflict between our ‘insatiable needs’ and

‘scarce natural resources’ only exists under capitalism; it need not

always be the case. If humanity is governed by the competitive

marketplace maxim ‘grow or die’, industry will literally devour the

biosphere, turning forests into lumber and soil into sand.

‘If you make yourselves the soil, and cooperate with your neighbours; if

you utilise what experiment has already taught us, and call to your aid

science and technical invention, you will see that to grow that yearly

food of a family, under rational conditions of culture, requires little

labour and little from the soil...’ — Kropotkin.