Jouni Korhonen

• Ph.D
• Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Business strategy with regard to sustainability is currently dominated by an eco-efficiency approach that seeks to simultaneously reduce costs and environmental impacts using tactics such as waste minimization or reuse, pollution prevention or technological improvement. However, in practice, eco-efficiency optimization rarely results in improved di...

In a recent article of this journal, Robert et al. [Journal of Cleaner Production 10 (2002) 197] define five hierarchical and interdependent levels for a systems approach for strategic sustainable development (SSD) to move toward the desired outcome, the state of sustainability. This paper evaluates the concept of industrial ecology (IE) by conside...

Industrial ecology and the industrial ecosystem approach (IE) are emerging concepts in ecological economics, environmental policy and corporate environmental management. The natural ecosystem model of diverse recycling and cascading material and energy flow systems has been used in industrial systems that are contrasting to this, operating with lin...

This article is building the theory for the scientific field of industrial ecology. For this, the industrial ecosystem (IE) concept is used. IE uses the model of sustainable ecosystems in unsustainable industrial systems for making progress towards the vision of the industrial ecosystem. Six controversies are revealed and identified as research cha...

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In order to contribute to research on implementing business sustainability, this study aims to explore the distribution of decision-making authority related to economic, environmental, and social sustainability. Sustainability objectives between different organizational levels in multinational manufacturing enterprises (MMEs) are investigated. The...

The Circular Economy (CE) is currently a popular notion within the policy and business advocacy groups. Despite being visionary and provocative in its message, the research on the CE concept is emerging. The two intertwined objectives of the paper are; first to identify, discuss and develop the various definitions provided by the emerging literatur...

Circular economy (CE) is currently a popular concept promoted by the EU, by several national governments and by many businesses around the world. However, the scientific and research content of the CE concept is superficial and unorganized. CE seems to be a collection of vague and separate ideas from several fields and semi-scientific concepts. The...

The concepts of efficiency and resilience are important in complex adaptive systems. Efficiency and resilience have been compared in complex systems, but the data and materials have mainly been derived from natural ecosystems. The actual environmental impacts of this comparison with data and materials from human economic systems is an important res...

The idea of this editorial research article is to start making sense out of the seemingly limitless debate on the environmental dimension of sustainable development. We have evaluated a collection of international peer-reviewed papers. These contributions have been debated at the conferences of the International Sustainable Development Research Soc...

The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is among the central concepts in strategic management. The four Industrial Ecosystem Principles (IEPs) are among the central theoretical constructs in industrial ecology. This theoretical contribution applies the BSC approach to IEPs to construct an Industrial Ecosystem Balanced Scorecard (IEBSC). BSC breaks the strateg...

This paper shows the main limitations and difficulties in the efficiency argument of ecological modernization. Eight limitations in the concept of eco-efficiency are revealed. Recommendations to improve the use of eco-efficiency in ecological modernization policy and management are derived from the critique. Eco-efficiency serves as an important te...

This editorial article of Progress in Industrial Ecology special issue 'System Boundaries of Industrial Symbioses' introduces the themes and objectives of the special issue and reflects on the 12 published international peer-reviewed article contributions. Our research objective is to identify what dimensions and questions are important and what fu...

The process of sustainable development and its goal, sustainability, are difficult to define. Many conflicting interests and preferences are involved. Recently, scientists have attempted a principle-orientated definition of sustainability. Unlike specific, detailed and quantitative thresholds, principles can be general, qualitative, flexible and su...

Four principles for a systems approach to sustainability, which have been suggested as prescriptive, normative and desirable, are analysed. Limitations in the principles are observed. The four principles are developed into descriptive indicators, metrics or tools that can be used in sustainability systems analysis to study important properties of a...

Microeconomics Eco-Efficiency (EE) theory is now a normative and prescriptive political position and a management goal. Macroeconomics science proves that microeconomics EE theory is false. The EE overall objective and vision is a relative ratio. That of macroeconomics sustainability is an absolute limit. Simple calculations of EE and factor X targ...

No abstract available.

This editorial article for the double special issue of Progress in Industrial Ecology, 'Theoretical dimensions of industrial ecology', reviews the ten accepted contributions. We find four themes that we perceive as challenges for the theory of industrial ecology in terms of its contribution to sustainability science and sustainable development: 1 d...

This contribution continues the new and currently intensive international peer-reviewed scientific debate on the Strategic Sustainable Development (SSD) model and The Natural Step (TNS) framework. Despite the many already existing and rapidly emerging disciplines, concepts, approaches, tools, societies, journals and conferences addressing sustainab...

The Theory of Industrial Ecology (Korhonen, 2004a) classified the properties and characteristics of industrial ecosystems: • the physical flows of matter and energy • the structural and organisational properties. I focus on the theory of the concept of diversity, an important concept in ecology, biology and sustainable development research. Can the...

In recent literature on sustainable development, several authors use the natural ecosystem metaphor in economic systems and technological systems. Others are very critical arguing that the source or the base system of the metaphor, the natural ecosystem, is described or interpreted in a wrong and inaccurate way when the metaphor is used. The object...

This contribution to the Journal of Cleaner Production special issue ‘Applications of Industrial Ecology’ is based upon an extensive literature review, which produced four criteria to characterise research on the concept of industrial ecology (IE). The criteria are (1) material and energy flows, (2) systems improvement, (3) systems adaptation and (...

This contribution to the Journal of Cleaner Production special issue ‘Applications of Industrial Ecology’ is based upon an extensive literature review, which produced four criteria to characterise research on the concept of industrial ecology (IE). The criteria are (1) material and energy flows, (2) systems improvement, (3) systems adaptation and (...

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...

The scavengers and decomposers in ecosystems are presented as metaphors for agricultural and food industry systems' sustainability. These organisms of ecosystems can both take in wastes from other organisms as well as produce materials for them to use. We argue that the metaphor is beneficial for considering the physical flows of matter and energy...

In an idealised industrial ecosystem (IE), firms and organisations utilise 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 (SD). IE complements the more conven...

This contribution introduces the vision, aims and scope of our new journal, Progress in Industrial Ecology: An International Journal. We introduce the seventeen papers of this ''massive'' triple issue – the first issue of the new journal – as well as discussing their connections and shared messages in making progress in the transition towards a mor...

The central question of the theory of industrial ecology (IE) is whether IE is/will be a form of descriptive or prescriptive science. Some debate the same (more or less) question by asking whether IE is objective or normative. This author argues that in the case of the physical flows of matter and energy the description of the ecosystem flows can p...

Within the emerging concept of industrial ecology (IE) that belongs to the research and practical field of sustainable development (SD), the natural ecosystem evolution over time has been described as a metaphor that presents systems of type I, type II and type III ecology. Type I describes a situation when there was little life on earth and plenty...

Forestry, forest, pulp and paper industries provide important cases for environmental and ecological economics and for corporate environmental management, because of the large quantities of flows of material and energy that are derived from the natural ecosystem. Because of the natural capital intensive nature of its activity, the forest industry a...

Industrial ecology (IE) studies the physical flows of matter and energy within, and most importantly, between the natural ecosystem and the human industrial system, aiming to reduce the environmental burden of the flows. One of the applications used is to transform the industrial system linear ‘throughput’ material and energy flow that relies on im...

This paper is critical towards efforts that try and measure corporate social responsibility (CSR). A critical approach can be important for the development of the theory of the emerging field of corporate social responsibility. A critical and provocative approach can generate discussion and debate. Three main points of critique are presented toward...

This paper attempts to bridge business ethics to corporate social responsibility including the social and environmental dimensions. The objective of the paper is to suggest a conceptual methodology with which ethics of corporate environmental management tools can be considered. The method includes two stages that are required for a shift away from...

Local or regional development, economic, quality, social and environmental questions and problems have been addressed in national and regional policy, in the management of a municipal organisation as well as in the traditional or economic management systems of individual companies located in the region. What is common to all of these issues is that...

Co-production of electricity, district heat and industrial heat/process steam (heat and power, CHP) has been applied to a large, national scale, in only a few countries in the world, Denmark, The Netherlands and Finland. In this production method, the waste energy from electricity production is used in two quality levels. First, industrial process...

Industrial recycling networks offer an example of the practical application of some of the industrial ecology (IE) principles. In the industrial ecosystem and eco-industrial park approaches the material cycles and energy cascades in a natural ecosystem serve as the metaphoric vision for a local/regional industrial system in which waste material and...

The lack of landfill capacity, forthcoming EU waste disposal and landfill management legislation and the use of non-renewable and energy intensive natural resources for the end-treatment of old landfills increase pressures to develop new landfill management methods. This paper considers a method for the end-management of old landfills in Finland, w...

For many centuries, industrial societies in the Western modernity have been driven by a dominant social paradigm (DSP). It is argued in this paper that this paradigm has some serious difficulties in the light of the development of the field of corporate social responsibility and in the light of its practice. Therefore, a new paradigmatic foundation...

The emerging concept of industrial ecology (IE) has been applied in practice in few case studies on local/regional industrial recycling networks. Analogously to a natural ecosystem, the aim is to develop material cycles and energy cascades between local cooperative actors. An optimal resource basis of an industrial ecosystem is the sustainable use...

Industrial ecology (IE) promotes the development of industrial systems based on recycling of matter and cascading of energy through cooperation. In this paper, the local/regional industrial ecosystem approach is reflected in two examples from Finland. The local forest industry system is based on renewable resources, waste materials and energy utili...

The development of the practical side of the concept of industrial ecology has taken two different but interrelated paths during the last two decades: the product-based systems perspective; and the geographically defined local-regional industrial ecosystem approach. Both approaches focus on material and energy flows aiming at reducing the industria...

The resource basis of industrial energy production is still, to a large extent, in non-renewable fossil fuels, the use of which creates emissions that the ecosystem has difficulty in tolerating. The goal of industrial ecology is to substitute the non-renewable stocks with renewable flows. In this paper, a regional industrial ecosystem that relies o...

Industrial Ecology is an industrial environmental management concept with an analogy in the natural ecosystem. In an ecosystem, materials are recycled between organisms, and energy is embedded in the matter of the food chain, while the only external input to the system as a whole is the solar energy. An Industrial Ecosystem is a system where the in...

This paper considers the possibility to develop cleaner energy production with a perspective on regional material and energy flow management. The co-production method of district and industrial heat/steam and electricity (of heat and power, CHP) using renewable or waste fuels is viewed as a physical anchor tenant function for locally based industri...

Material and energy flows within and between the societal systems and the natural ecosystem result in the depletion of natural resources and threaten the capacity of nature to assimilate wastes and emissions. In this paper, the aim is to compare the material and energy flows of nature to these same flows in an industrial system. The ecosystem mater...

The industrial system operates through different principles of system development than the ecosystem. Industrial ecology can be a fruitful metaphor for facilitating the development of industrial systems toward the principles of system development of ecosystems. In this paper the industrial ecosystem analogy includes the four ecosystem principles of...

Industrial ecology (IE) is an emerging concept from industrial environmental management arising from a provocative ecosystem analogy of recycling or roundput systems. The systems approach in the concept, i.e. to facilitate the emergence of entire industrial systems based on cooperation in waste material and energy utilization between the actors inv...

The development of Industrial Ecology (IE) is based on the philosophy that the two systems, the industrial system and the ecosystem operate through different principles of system development and on the philosophy that IE can serve to reduce the conflict between the two systems as it learns from the model of an ecosystem. In an IE, following the rou...

In order for society to secure a healthy environment and reach sustainability, there is a need for reconsideration of municipal environmental management (MEM). Among other things, the potential roles of a municipality in regionally oriented environmental management and development planning have to be further analysed. In this paper, MEM is confront...

In a similar way to several other areas of management, approaches to networking and network systems have received increasing attention in the literature on corporate or industrial environmental management. It has been acknowledged that the life cycles of products and their resource use, waste and emission generation are affected by or affect many d...

In order for society to secure a healthy environment and reach sustainability, there is a need for reconsideration of municipal environmental management (MEM). Among other things, the potential roles of a municipality in regionally oriented environmental management and development planning have to be further analysed. In this paper, MEM is confront...

The concept of industrial ecology (IE) adopts the ecosystem principle of roundput in human industrial systems as the emphasis is on the utilization of wastes between different industrial actors. IE faces new challenges, as the emission and waste structures of the industrial world are continuously changing and the importance of the latter steps of t...

Business strategy with regard to sustainability is currently dominated by an eco-effi ciency approach that seeks to simultaneously reduce costs and environmental impacts using tactics such as waste minimization or reuse, pollution prevention or technological improve- ment. However, in practice, eco-effi ciency optimization rarely results in improve...