Sigma Xi Interdisciplinary Invited Speaker Brian K. Thorn, PhD, "The Emergence of Industrial Ecosystems", sponsored by the School of Engineering

Faculty and staff are welcome and encouraged to attend!

"The Emergency of Industrial Ecosystems"

There has been a good deal of discussion regarding the need to develop a “circular economy” in order to move toward the

goals of sustainability. The circular economy model aims to decouple economic activity from resource consumption thereby

enabling economic growth without generating new waste or exhausting valuable resources. An enabling element in such a

transition will be more extensive distribution of “Industrial Ecosystems” to provide the goods and services that we rely on.

Industrial ecosystems deliver goods and services in such a way that the waste generated by one part of the system becomes

the input for another part of the system. This presentation will describe some of the contextual elements that enable

development of industrial ecosystems, offer several existing examples of such systems, and discuss the advantages and

drawbacks of these integrated systems.