Members of the ISIE are able to join subject sections as part of their membership. Sections provide a small community within the ISIE through which ideas are exchanged and collaborations are formed. Members can engage on a minimal level or can be considered for leadership positions within a Section. Read below to learn more about the currently active subject sections.
The Student Chapter provides support for today’s students – the future industrial ecologists – to enter and collaborate with the International Society of Industrial Ecology. Not only that, it provides a space for students to interact with each other and with professionals and share resources, databases, and dissertations, among other things.
Today, students represent an important share of the ISIE membership. The offer of study courses and master’s and PhD programs related to industrial ecology is growing each year. You can find a list with industrial ecology related courses and programs here.
Those of us with a passion for translating the theories of industrial ecology into practice are pleased to announce the Section of the International Society for Industrial Ecology devoted to industrial symbiosis. Practitioners might be more familiar with the terms Eco-Industrial development or Eco-Industrial networking, rather than industrial symbiosis. I hope you will choose to enroll in the Industrial Symbiosis/Eco-Industrial Development Section of the International Society for Industrial Ecology. At future ISIE conferences, members from our section will serve as moderators for industrial symbiosis presentations. Download bylaws here.
If you are interested in Industrial Symbiosis, Eco-Industrial Development, are a practitioner or an academic; we invite you to join the Industrial Symbiosis Eco-Industrial Development Council. We have posted by-laws and information on creating indicators for eco-industrial parks which we hope to engage our community of members in discussing and preparing.
The purpose of this Section is to develop industrial symbiosis internationally in academia and to promote its application in policy and businesses. This includes establishing and maintaining cooperation with international organizations, companies, and government organizations.
Become a section member!
Welcome to the Sustainable Urban Systems Section (SUS Section)!
We are working hard on the new SUS Section platform. Constantly you will find new content that allows you to keep up to date on the new developments, research, events and disruptive innovations regarding sustainable urban systems and its development using IE concepts. So stay tune for more!
Events
In the Events Section you will find upcoming events worldwide of interest for the SUS Section community.
Would you like to promote an event on our Website? Please let us know at: urban@isi4e.org we are glad to hear about your contribution!
News
Learn all about the news from our members and contributors. In this section you can contribute with any news you might have of interest to the SUS Section community and keep yourself up to date with the new developments from our wrodwide members!
Resources
In the Resources Section you will find Dissertations and Research Projects from our members, Links of Interests, and Administrative Documents from our section.
Members and JOIN US NOW!
Check out the members of the SUS Section! You will find worldwide members with multiple disciplines and one common interest: the research and development of sustainable urban systems. Look for colleagues on your specific area of interest and connect to them for possible collaborations! Don’t miss out the opportunity to interact and get to know our SUS Section members: JOIN US NOW!
Member Spotlights
Launched in April 2018, Member Spotlights is a new program to connect our members and help everybody to get to know each other. We do this by releasing a new member intro periodically. This section features a members who explains more about her/his background, research interests, collaboration ideas, etc.
Leadership
In this section you will find all the information regarding the administrative work force of the SUS Section.
Contact us
If you have any questions or if you want to give us your input please write us at:urban@isi4e.org.We will write back to you as soon as possible. We thank you in advance for your interest in the SUS Section!
Information on upcoming and previous sessions of the ISIE-SEM perpetual online conference can be found here.
Our section platform will keep you up-to-date on new developments, events and research within socio-economic metablism.
In the Events Section you will find upcoming events worldwide of interest for the SEM Section community.
Would you like to promote an event on our website? Please let us know at: metabolism@is4ie.org
Check out the members of the SEM Section. Here, you will find information about our members all with one common interest: the study and development of socio-economic metabolism. Connect with colleagues within our field.
Please send your questions, comments and feedback to metabolism@is4ie.org. Thank you for your interest in the SEM Section!
The purpose of this Section is to develop environmentally extended input output analysis internationally in academia and to promote its application in policy and businesses. This includes establishing and maintaining cooperation with international organizations, companies, and government organizations. The section may collaborate with the International Input Output Association when organizing its activities.”
More specifically, the section may engage in the following activities:
This section will focus on life cycle assessment (LCA) as currently existing and on life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) as a direction in which LCA is likely to develop. This section is intended for those working in the field of LCA and LCSA, for those interested in promoting life-cycle thinking, and also for those interested in bringing various life-cycle based tools together and linking them to appropriate questions and applications. We believe the section will provide a platform for IE scholars already working in this field and may draw new perspectives and scholars to the field of IE.
Environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) has developed quickly over the last three decades. Beginning as merely energy analysis and expanding to a comprehensive environmental burden analysis in the 1970s, full-fledged life cycle impact assessment and life cycle costing (LCC) models were introduced in the 1980s and 1990s, and social-LCA and particularly consequential LCA gained ground in the first decade of the 21st century. Many of the more recent developments have been initiated to broaden traditional environmental LCA to a more comprehensive Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA; cf. Guinée et al., http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/es101316v). LCA is evolving into LCSA, which is a trans-disciplinary framework for integration of models rather than a model in itself. LCSA works with a plethora of disciplinary models and guides selection of the most appropriate to address any specific sustainability question. The main challenge is structuring, selecting, and making the diversity of disciplinary models available for practical application to all types of life cycle sustainability questions. Within this broader view, traditional environmental LCA still has its value fulfilling one specific requirement of this broader life-cycle sustainability framework.
This IE section offers a platform for discussing methodology proposals and case studies addressing the broadening and deepening of LCA into LCSA, addressing topics such as:
From these topics it is likely that this section will make cross-links between sections, such as with the IE sections on Material Flow Analysis (MFA), Environmentally Extended Input Output (EEIO) and the upcoming section on SCP. Moreover, owing to the multi-disciplinarity of the issue, we will strive to attract new scholars to the field of IE, for example, social science scholars. We would also like to explore the possibilities for joint PhD colloquia for engineering/environmental science research students and social science research students.
Islands are sites of compound events and multiple risks. They are highly vulnerable to the impacts of global warming such as sea-level rise, flooding, droughts, and hurricanes. Practices such as infrastructure development along the coast, high imports, undiversified exports, poor waste management, and centralized energy systems are additional stressors. At the same time, islands are excellent systems for Industrial Ecology scholarship and offer a rare opportunity for sustainability research and transformation. With relatively well-defined boundaries, naturally and socially, they can be “real-world laboratories”, an approach that is gaining momentum in addressing societal challenges.
The Island Industrial Ecology (or Island-IE) section of the ISIE promotes basic and policy-relevant industrial ecology research on islands to foster a transformation to sustainability. The Section encourages combining transdisciplinary approaches to engage stakeholders for more inclusive resource-use patterns on islands. Section members address issues such as resource self-sufficiency, food, and energy security, sustainable water and nutrient management, (disaster) waste management, resilient infrastructure, and the equitable distribution of costs and benefits of resource-use. Concepts applied include (but not limited to) circular economy, socio-metabolic research, industrial symbiosis, decoupling, life-cycle approaches, citizen science, material recoverability, green infrastructure, and nature-based solutions to enhance system resilience.
You can find the bylaws for the Island Industrial Ecology Section here.
