9724931 Andrews The PI's propose a one day workshop for a small number of senior engineers, social and natural scientists, and practitioners to discuss scale issues in implementing industrial ecology. The event has three important goals: (1) build better linkages between the research, business, and policy communities; (2) encourage implementation of lessons learned to date; and (3) scope future research needs in one comer of this young, cross- cutting field. More than just a powerful metaphor, industrial ecology offers a systematic way of looking at the environmental impacts of modern industrial activity. It emphasizes the dense web of interconnections between actors in modern economies, and it highlights the prominent role of industry determining the overall environmental burden. The normative vision includes a transformation from a simple, linear, oncethrough industrial ecosystem to a more efficient arrangement which re-uses most materials and requires few exogenous inputs to keep the system going. Implicit in this vision is active participation of industry, and public policies designed to complement rather than substitute for market forces. Scale issues become important when (1) sorting out the relative merits of proposals for example, an eco-industrial park versus a waste exchange strategy; (2) the boundaries of economic and political systems are not coincident; and (3) analyzing the system's dynamics-how an industrial ecosystem evolves. This project includes four tasks: prepare a background paper and agenda, select workshop participants, convene the workshop, and write up the results. The investigators see the workshop as the scoping phase of a longer term research project on scale issues in implementing industrial ecology. It is timely to hold this workshop for two reasons: key lessons from previous research are now ready to be implemented, and future research in this burgeoning field needs to be prioritized. ***
