At the Australasian Industrial Ecology Conference in Sydney in July 2009, the members of the Conference Committee voted to form a special interest group in NSW under the umbrella of the Waste Management Association of Australia (WMAA). The new group proposes to attract other companies with a similar interest in pursuing Industrial Ecology to join.

The group’s objective is to promote & encourage the development of activities, processes & relationship between entities which convert surplus, spent or unwanted materials, energy and services into valuable resources.

Ultimately, the aim is to have similar groups in each Australian state and link them together to share knowledge, ideas and technology by forming a National Division under the WMAA. This will be the seventh National Division under WMAA and the group will be able to collaborate with the other National Divisions.

Industrial Ecology promotes enhanced sustainability by stimulating innovations in the reuse of waste materials. The wastes or by-products of one industry are used as inputs in another industry, thereby closing the material loop of industrial systems and minimizing waste.

• Waste and by-products must be reused as input materials in a systematic way to close the material cycle as efficiently as possible;
  
• Loss caused by dispersion must be minimized. This refers to products such as fertilizers, tyres, or solvents that may be dispersed into the environment and there is an obvious need to minimize the harmful effects and design of these products.
  
• Maintaining the material balance. In material flow terms, this means ensuring that not more of a particular resource is used in one year than the amount of the resource produced in that same year.
  
• Keeping renewable and non-renewable resources as long as possible in the material cycles, unless this is not environmentally desirable.
  
• Energy must rely less on fossil hydrocarbons, while stimulating the use of renewable energy as much as possible.

Download About Industrial Ecology: About Industrial Ecology.pdf