John R. Ehrenfeld

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology

To put Planet Earth on a sustainable trajectory, we need a new normative vision to guide the design of institutions and artifacts. Sustainability has failed. Instead, the positive image of flourishing has the power to reverse the course of environmental and social deterioration. Flourishing represents the realization of living creatures’ biological...

This article examines key barriers to business sustainability discussed at a multidisciplinary conference held at the Harvard Business School in 2018. Drawing on perspectives from both the historical and business literatures, speakers debated the historical success of and future opportunities for voluntary business actions to advance sustainability...

Sustainability has become mainstream in both management practice and management research. Firms incorporate sustainability strategies into their core mission. University administrators promote sustainability as central to their curricula. Scholars pursue sustainability as a bona fide field of research inquiry. Given this level of attention and acti...

Flourishing: A Frank Conversation about Sustainability invites you into a conversation between a teacher, John R. Ehrenfeld, and his former student now professor, Andrew J. Hoffman, as they discuss how to create a sustainable world. Unlike virtually all other books about sustainability, this one goes beyond the typical stories that we tell ourselve...

The idea proposed here is that the many strategic, organizational, and operational efforts around sustainability can benefit from the addition of reflective practices, whether at the individual, team, organizational, or systems level. Reflective practices can contribute to greater spiritual wellbeing, which the authors propose is essential for busi...

Industrial symbiosis examines cooperative management of resource flows through networks of businesses known in the literature as industrial ecosystems. These industrial ecosystems have previously been portrayed as having characteristics of complex adaptive systems, but with insufficient attention to the internal and external phenomena describing th...

This article concentrates on creating sustainability that is already becoming central to business strategy formation and implementation. It is believed that business will be shaped by a different sense of the term "sustainability". The most important sustainability beliefs are that the world operates as a complex, not mechanistic, system, and human...

A product is a transient embodiment of material and energy occurring in the course of material and energy process flows of the industrial system.

Sustainability and its derivatives fall into the same class as a few of the key concepts underlying liberal democracies everywhere—like equality, freedom, and liberty—that are explicitly written into the founding documents of the United States. Such terms have been called “essentially contested concepts” (ECCs), signifying that there is an ongoing,...

Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is a new method for exploring the environmental implications of human action. Like all methods, it is analytically limited and consequently it must be used with caution. Recent papers have criticized LCA and caution against its use in all but a few narrow applications. Even while accepting many of these arguments, this a...

Hat Industrial Ecology als Fach oder Disziplin eine eigene Daseinsberechtigung oder fristet sie lediglich ein Schattendasein im Kontext von Nachhaltigkeit oder nachhaltiger Entwicklung? Bezieht man sich auf eine der meistzitierten Definitionen des Fachgebietes, lautet die Antwort vermutlich „nein, Nachhaltigkeit ist nicht unverzichtbar.“ Als das Fa...

The developed world, increasingly aware of "inconvenient truths" about global warming and sustainability, is turning its attention to possible remedies-eco-efficiency, sustainable development, and corporate social responsibility, among others. But such measures are mere Band-Aids, and they may actually do more harm than good, says John Ehrenfeld, a...

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Industrial ecology rests historically—even in a short lifetime of 15 years or so—on the metaphorical power of natural ecosystems. Its evolution parallels the rise of concerns over unsustainability, that is, the threats to our world's ability to support human life the emergence of sustainability as a normative goal on a global scale. This article ex...

Corporate environmental practices have been evolving quite rapidly in recent years, as consumers express their preferences for environmentally friendly products and practices, as manufacturers look “upstream” and inquire into their suppliers' environmental practices due to liability and marketing concerns, and as company operating costs increase as...

Polaroid Corporation has established an ambitious pollution prevention program that calls for reducing chemical use and waste by 10 percent per unit per year during the period 1988 to 1993. A notable aspect of Polaroid'S efforts is the environmental accounting and reporting system (EARS) it has developed to measure progress toward this goal. EARS i...

For most of its history of environmental protection, U.S. policy has concentrated on a pollution control strategy based on single medium emissions: air, water, or land. Efforts to mitigate environmental impacts to one medium often resulted in greater impacts to others. While much environmental improvement has occurred via this system over the last...

This paper builds on previous research on the contemporary role of the university, which was based on the conceptual approach that the accumulation of knowledge is the fundamental driving force behind economic growth. We argue that the university must respond to changes in the world that challenge its well-established pedagogical and epistemologica...

A movement that began almost accidentally 35 years ago in Denmark is showing that when factories use the waste of other nearby factories as their raw material, advantages to the environment and the local economy abound.

In the 10 years since industrial ecology first became a topic of academic interest, it has grown as a field of inquiry and has pro-duced a community of practice in several sectors including academia, business, and government. Even as the shape of industrial ecology becomes clearer, questions remain as to its lasting power beyond the metaphor that g...

In the face of alarming environmental and social imbalances, the growing push for sustainability has given hope to many thoughtful practitioners. But John Ehrenfeld, a leader in the emerging field of industrial ecology, questions the conventional approach to "sustainable development." Creating true sustainability, he argues, requires radical solu-...

This special issue is based on the international symposium Business and Industrial Ecology held alongside the 2003 Business Strategy and the Environment Conference in Leicester, UK. The main message is that the dominant natural science and engineering aspects of industrial ecology (IE) need to be linked to management and policy studies. IE has rapi...

Codes of environmental management practice emerged as a tool of environmental policy in the late 1980s. Industry and other groups have developed codes for two purposes: to change the environmental behavior of participating firms and to increase public confidence in industry's commitment to environmental protection. This review examines five codes o...

Findings and recommendations presented to the Automobitive Board of Governors, World Economic Forum, Davos. This report focuses on recycling. As an objective neutral party, MIT has compiled a knowledge base that examines the many complex issues relating to re-cycling. Although this report was prepared at the request of the Automotive board of Gover...

The goals of the EPA Office of Reinvention are the following: 1) use incentives and promote environmental management systems (EMSs) 2) provide timely and accessible compliance-assistance 3) create flexible and streamlined permitting 4) help communities make sound environmental decisions This research explores two recent initiatives related to th...

The field of industrial ecology is sufficiently well developed to boast its own meeting and journal. Nevertheless, the discipline still faces fundamental questions as to direction and who should be involved. John Ehrenfeld of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology examines the future for this emerging field.

A new interdisciplinary field is facing growing pains.

Industrial ecology was born about a decade ago. Since then it has grown as a field of inquiry and has produced a community of practice in several sectors, including academia, business and government. This paper takes a critical view of the developments so far and asks to what extent industrial ecology has taken on the attributes of more conventiona...

Ecodesign is examined critically, starting from an expanded definition of sustainability. Traditional ecodesign objectives arise from the naturalistic dimension of sustainability, but often fail to account for absolute limits of the global ecosystem. A second, generally overlooked dimension is humanistic, directed at the underlying human drive to s...

In recent years, demands from external stakeholders have created pressures for companies to adopt new environmental management practices. Some industries have developed their own non-regulatory codes of environment, health, and safety (EHS) practice. Have these codes generated substantive change in members' actions or do they simply reinforce exist...

Industrial ecology is an evolving framework for the analysis and design of public policy, corporate strategy, and technological systems and products. Its metaphorical denotation springs from conceptual models characteristic of sustainable or long-lived ecosystems. Some authors stress the material and energy flows within a system of producers and co...

Industrial ecology is an evolving framework for the analysis and design of public policy, corporate strategy, and technological systems and products. Its metaphorical denotation springs from conceptual models characteristic of sustainable or long-lived ecosystems. Some authors stress the material and energy flows within a system of producers and co...

A growing number of managers believe that addressing environmental impacts in product-design decisions has tangible advantages to firms. Yet many firms struggle to diffuse design-for-environment (DfE) practices across their product-development teams. Four leading electronics firms' attempts to adopt DfE suggest that the establishment of highly inte...

Industry-generated codes of environmental, health and safety practice represent one response to societal calls for improved corporate environmental management. Such codes seek to build a collective identity among members, improve members’ environmental performance, and demonstrate this improved performance among stakeholders and critics. This paper...

Indicators which reflect environmental, economic, health and safety issues, have been categorized as microecometrics and macroecometrics. The former, generally flow based measures, have been developed for local, firm-wide or product based assessments. Microecometrics include materials intensity, energy consumption and emissions data, often from lif...

Industrial ecology is a new system for describing and designing sustainable economies. Arising out of an ecological metaphor, it offers guidelines to designers of products and the institutional structures in which production and consumption occur, as well as frameworks for the analysis of complex material and energy flows across economies.

The exchange of wastes, by-products, and energy among closely situated firms is one of the distinctive features of the applications of industrial ecological principles. This article examines the industrial district at Kalundborg, Denmark, often labeled as an “industrial ecosystem” or “industrial symbiosis” because of the many links among the firms....

The ability to incorporate environmental concerns into the product development process is becoming increasingly important as diverse constituents make greater demands upon firms for improved environmental performance. Based on a review of the capabilities literature, we propose that environmental design capability derives from expertise on environm...

Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is a new method for exploring the environmental implications of human action. Like all methods, it is analytically limited and consequently it must be used with caution. Recent papers have criticized LCA and caution against its use in all but a few narrow applications. Even while accepting many of these arguments, this a...

Risk assessment and management and their progeny, risk perception and communication, pervade social dialogue and policy formulation in much of social, particularly environmental, action today. Following an introduction to the current context, the article critically examines the nature of risk relative to the policy domain. The critique suggests tha...

This paper presents the results of a broad survey of design for environment practice among US manufacturing firms. Data were gathered pertaining to both the corporate and business levels. The purpose of this study is to understand both the extent of adoption of DFE across industries as well as the patterns of adoption within individual firms

Private codes created by business are beginning to have a major impact on corporate environmental places-with benefits that go well beyond those achieved by regulation.

Industrial symbiosis, modelled on the natural world where organisms rely on each other for nutrients, has the potential to substantially cut the environmental and economic costs of manufacturing. This paper outlines an example of symbiosis as it occurs in the Danish seaside industrial town of Jalundborg. It explains how this complex industrial symb...

Over the past decade, private codes of environmental management practice have begun to emerge as a major force in corporate environmental programs. This paper compares the function of private codes to that of government regulation in the US. In particular, it describes the origins of each of the major codes and details the practices a company commi...