The Role of Innovation and Technology in Industrial Ecology Systems for the Sustainable Development of Emerging Regions


  •  Carlos Scheel    
  •  Manuel Vazquez    

Abstract

The excessive growth of industrialization and the enormous movement of economic and physical goods and resources by industrialized countries have created a social imbalance in the poorest regions and a tremendous impact on their environment and on the exhaustion of their natural resources. This situation converges into a dilemma that raises the question: “how to insert technology into the innovation chains to remedy, recycle, reuse and/or redesign industrial processes?” This study proposes a framework for harmoniously articulating the three large sub-systems (the economic, the social, and the environmental) of the natural ecosystem through a systemic model of industrial ecology supported by innovation systems and enabling technologies, capable of maintaining a synergy among all the constituents of the three subsystems, with the intention to arrive at a sustainable holistic development of the regions, mainly for developing countries.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.