Question: Why is the ‘ecological’ perspective important with regard to pollution control and what deficiencies of the traditional economic policy approach does it address?
Answer: The ‘ecological’ perspective is important with regard to pollution control because it focuses on changing production process to meet environmental efficiency, prevent pollution, and improve recycling and recovery as well as improves the efficiency of production (O’Rourke, Connelly and Koshland). Ecological perspective encourages just-in-time delivery system for industries, which in turn reduces cost of inventory and industrial wastage, which in turn reduces pollution. The ecological approach addresses essential requirements and organizes methodologies required to restructure industries to reduce environmental impact and pollution. It also gathers ideas and conceptualize ecological framework that industrial leaders, academia and government agencies use to design and implement better environmental platforms.
Unlike traditional economic policy, which is stuck in the context of innovating pollution control methods, ecological perspective offers transformational shift of pollution control methodologies towards a more robust and comprehensive policy design for environmentally friendly growth in industry. While traditional economic policy focuses on segments of environmental impacts as brought about by industrial development, ecological approach adopts a holistic scheme for redesigning industrial activities. It works on total transformation of industrial sectors to reduce environmental impacts. In traditional economic policy lacks integrity and strategic management in production of goods. It simple run manufacturing processes to produce goods by drawing raw materials and generating wastes to be disposed of (Frosch and Gallopoulos). On the other hand, the industrial ecosystem focuses on building an integrated and well developed process where manufacturing processes are optimized to reduce waste and the effluents of one process is utilized as the raw good for the other. It can be thought of as a cohesive process that integrates industrial processes, technologies and consumer behaviors you can read about this in the climate change essays.
Question: What challenges does the ecological approach face relative to the traditional economic policy approach?
Answer: Being a new perspective to
environmental management, ecological approach faces many challenges, which
traditional economic policy approach does not face (Garner
and Keoleian). The findings of industrial ecology cannot be applied widely
because of the gap exists between research and implementation in concrete
political platform (Bringezu). There exists no
monitoring tool for observing the mechanism of industrial metabolism across the
whole country. The absence of adequate linkage between material flow and
economic factors is also a problem that hinders widespread application of
ecological approach. To develop an integrated approach that can achieve the
goals of environmental cleanliness and pollution control, while retaining the
productivity unaltered is highly challenging task that ecological needs to
resolve. Proper education and policy development for bringing industrial
revolution are two factors that ecological approach must consider to transform
the traditional economic policy approach into an environmentally friendly
approach. To reduce environmental burden and negative impacts that a useful industrial
system introduce is highly challenging for an ecological approach. Being a
holistic approach, it requires participation of many disciplines, which is
sometimes difficult to arrange (Garner and Keoleian). Expertise from different
fields such as engineering, law, economics, business, public health and natural
resources are essential to solve many complex situation that ecological
approach faces in resolving environmental complexities brought about by industrial
activities. Balancing the technological changes with the changing consumer
behaviors is one of the major challenges that ecological approach face as oppose
to traditional economic policy approach.