Eco-Industrial Parks: one step toward sustainable development

The necessity to follow the rules of sustainable development in the everyday industrial practice has led to the formulation of the concept of an industrial ecosystem mimicking the natural ecosystem. Eco-Industrial Parks(EIPs) provide a basis for applying this concept in meso-level of industrial development. In an ideal EIP as an industrial ecosystem, firms and organizations utilize each other,s material and energy flows including wastes and by-products to reduce the system, s virgin material and energy input as well as the waste and emission output from the system as a whole, and contribute to sustainable development. Considering the increasing procedure of industrial development in developing countries, such as Iran, it seems necessary to take account much more carefully into EIP, s main rules for waste management in these countries. According to this necessity, this paper tries to introduce EIP, s characteristics by comparing natural ecosystems with industrial ones in addition to recommending four main ecosystem principles, which contain: roundput, diversity, locality and gradual changes, for an industrial ecosystem. At the end, by considering all above points, an ideal industrial ecosystem will be interpreted

Eco-Industrial Parks: one step toward sustainable development Keywords:

sustainable development , industrial ecosystems , EIP , waste management , material and energy flow