Congratulations to BiSSL MS student Colton Brehm! His conference paper for the 26th CIRP Life Cycle Engineering Conference on Advancing Industrial Sustainability, to be held at Purdue University May 2019, is nominated for the Leo Award for best paper!

“Designing eco-industrial parks in a nested structure to mimic mutualistic ecological networks,” first authored by Colton Brehm

Industrial Ecology uses ecological systems as a guide for improving the sustainability of complex industrial systems. Eco-Industrial Parks (EIPs) have gained support as a solution that seeks to simultaneously reduce environmental burdens and promote economic interests by exchanging materials and energy between industries to their mutual benefit. Recent studies have focused on drawing relations between food webs (FWs) and EIPs to improve the sustainability of the latter using ecological metrics, such as the level of cycling or average connections between actors. This study incorporates a new ecological metric, nestedness, into the discussion of sustainable design for EIPs. The association of nestedness with mutualistic ecological networks supports its application to EIP design. The work here improves the understanding of holistic network structure with the goal of improving future design decisions for EIPs with purposeful placement of material and energy flows.