9873587 Andrews Industrial ecologists have traditionally examined systems with boundaries convenient to the accounting requirements, such as the natural boundaries of river basins or the economic boundaries of firms, industries or national markets. However, important decision-making needs cut across systems defined by such boundaries. A city, for example, is a relatively open system when viewed in economic or environmental terms. The primary objectives of this research are to develop methods for "place-based" industrial ecology, to test strategies for analyzing open industrial ecosystems and to expand the social science component of industrial ecology. This project will achieve its objectives by performing an industrial ecological analysis of the city of Trenton, NJ. Leading members of the community will participate in scoping the study and in evaluating its adequacy, value, effectiveness and legitimacy. The project will develop and apply a set of analysis tools and reflect on their efficacy in practice. Tool development will draw on regional economics, that has developed techniques such as location quotients, shift-share analysis and regional input-output analysis, as well as standard statistical and systems-analytical methods to deal with open economic systems. This work will thus have strong roots in social science, relying on the insights of modern microeconomics (especially the transaction cost and public choice paradigms). Regional economic tools will be adapted and extended to industrial ecology questions at the macro-level of materials and energy flows, the meso-level of community structure, the micro-level of individual behaviors and the sub-organism level of metabolic processes. This project will provide methodological advances of two kinds to the field of industrial ecology: (1) it will introduce and test tools for analyzing open systems and (2) it will increase the social science content of industrial ecology. The project will have broader impacts by aligning industrial ecology research more closely with the needs of one of its primary consumers: place-based decision makers. This will make the field more relevant to environmental policy. This grant is made pursuant to the joint NSF/Lucent Technologies Industrial Ecology Research Fellowships Program 1998.
