Suggested use? On evidence‐based decision‐making in industrial ecology and beyond

Abstract

Industrial ecology (IE) research has well established expertise in accounting for the material stocks, flows, and associated impacts of industrial and consumer activities in a variety of scales and manifestations. As with many other science and social science fields, however, the pathways from IE research findings to policy and business decision-making are often unclear and unsatisfactory. This issue creates a challenge for the application of industrial ecology to sustainable development. By reviewing several strands of literature, this article investigates alternative ways to generate and use research findings to support decision-making and social change. It argues that advances in both the core and the emerging methods in IE complement each other to improve transparency and reliability of research evidence; extension and contextualization of current findings corresponding to different stages in policy-making and organizational decision processes make research evidence more informative; a learning perspective makes research evidence valuable and used in more flexible ways. To better assist decision-making for societal change, more dialogues between researchers of different methodological cultures and between researchers and other stakeholders and a paradigm shift in social systems for which industrial ecologists should be conscious and proactive are required.

Industry 4.0 real-world testing of dynamic organizational life cycle assessment (O-LCA) of a ceramic tile manufacturer

“…For this reason, companies aiming to comply with new environmental regulations, such as carbon emission policies (Chang et al 2021), must design and implement natural resources (Barbosa et al 2022) and energy (D'Adamo et al 2020) sourcing strategies that ensure environmental protection while preserving their productivity, competitiveness, and profitability (Zhou et al 2021). This requires tools that support evidence-based decision making, and the extensive collection of information and data needed to make better-informed decisions (Zhu 2020) and to design sustainable business models (Godina et al 2020). Among the evidencebased tools that decision makers can use for environmental analysis (Douziech et al 2021), the life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology is one of the most comprehensive for tracking and generating quantitative information about the environmental impacts of the activities and facilities involved in the production, supply, consumption and end-of-life treatment of products (Bisinella et al 2021).…”

Carbon and water conservation value of independent, place‐based repair in Lima, Peru

“…Normative concerns are at industrial ecology's (IE) core. As Zhu (2020, p. 1) writes, IE seeks to “generate and use research findings to support decision‐making and social change.” Researchers from outside the field of IE proper have recently articulated what they see as a need for more substantive and explicit linking of IE research and “the political”—broadly defined as struggles pertaining to power and how they shape the situations in which industrial projects or stocks and flows of resources are situated (Breetz, 2017; Newell et al., 2017). These research concerns with the political lead advocates to articulate the case for political industrial ecology or PIE.…”