BE: MUSES: Modeling Eco-Industrial Symbiosis: Greening of Regional Industrial Materials Networks

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

This Biocomplexity in the Environment (BE) for: Materials Use: Science, Engineering, and Society (MUSES) study aims to develop new tools to assess and optimize industrial networks in world city-regions. World city-regions are enormous digesters of material, water and energy, functioning as intermediate nodes in linear systems of material consumption and waste discharge. An ongoing transition from linear to looped systems in industrial regions holds great promise for reducing adverse human impacts of production and service industries on the environment. The tool to be developed through the proposed research will facilitate the design of alternative regional industrial networks with the objective of achieving an eco-industrial symbiosis. The overarching field of endeavor is industrial ecology with collaborations from industrial geographers, regional econometricians, reverse logistics and eco-industrial park development. The team will attempt integration of models and data sets from these fields and will develop an operational model of waste and by-product flows in a regional industrial network. The results will be ground-truthed through a series of discussions with a number of representative firms in a major urban infrastructure. This work will function as a proof of concept research, clarifying additional expertise needed to carry out a full-scale modeling and analysis. USC's NSF Integrated Graduate Education Research and Training (IGERT), "Sustainable Cities Program" (SCP) will coordinate the efforts among the multiple disciplines. The Program already funds several undergraduate and graduate students from a variety of fields related to sustainable development. The proposed project presents new opportunities for the SCP to train and educate undergraduate students and doctoral fellows in theoretical and applied industrial ecology.