Industrial ecology

ENVIRONMENT AND its protection has been the most discussed subject during the last decade.

In the 1980s, two engineers then working at General Motors showed how to analyse a factory the same way as an eco system. That is, list the materials consumed in the manufacturing process and draw the balance sheet of the finished good and waste such as scrap. ``What goes in must come out'' is the basis of this assessment. The goal is to account for every gram of material and joule of energy going into and out of a product.

According to the study of the World Resources Institute, Washington, in 1997, the depletion of natural resources is 100 times the body weight of each human being per year.

This depletion rate is prodigious. Despite, it is amazing to find that tons of material are callously thrown away as scrap!

Take the example of a computer to Robert Frosch (Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University), a computer is like a frog. For in respect of analysis, both contain energy-intensive materials: organic molecules for the frog, plastics and metals for the computer. ``Both use energy as they operate. And like a dead frog decomposing in a marsh, an obsolete computer will decay somewhere, may be in a landfill or riverbed. Before the computer is junked, Frosch would like to see it picked over by a scrap dealer, a little like the micro organisms that turn waste into fertiliser,'' observes a report in Science.

The underlying concepts set forth by Frosch and like-minded scientists are:

* design with disassembly in mind.

* scrutiny of products material and flows

* find alternatives to lead solder for making circuit boards

* capture precious metals that may otherwise end as garbage and

* cut back on waste

These ideas have since caught on for every product from an electronic appliance to a motor car. AT & T, the US telecom giant, took steps in 1990 to stamp plastics with identity tags for quick separation and assemble phones with snaps instead of glue at recycling centres. Japanese companies often employ, instead of plastics, magnesium alloy that can be easily recycled. As a director of IBM aptly summed up `the more you get into the question, the more you realise you can save money.'

The activities of this promising field received an academic backing three years ago when Yale University made a debut to spread the gospel, with starting the Journal of Industrial Ecology. (multipress.mit.edu/JIE)

This budding discipline involves engineering and management, as it tracks the flow of materials and energy consumed in production process for producing a balance sheet. It turns engineers into resource accountants in manufacturing industry.

R.Parthasarathy

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