ISIE 2019 Conference
The 10th biennial International Conference on Industrial Ecology (ISIE 2019) was held at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China from 7 to 11 July 2019.
The theme of this year’s conference was "Industrial Ecology for Eco-civilization". The conference highlighted the importance of transforming industrial civilization into eco-civilization, and the necessary theoretical innovation, methodological support, and development of tools to achieve the transformation. During the conference, series of thought-provoking plenary sessions, talks, presentations and discussions were held around a variety of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary topics, some of them including:
Circular economy
Complex theories and tools for industrial ecology
Energy-water-food-waste nexus
Environmental input-output analysis
Integrated models
Industrial ecology contributing to SDGs 2030
Industrial ecology management and policy
Life cycle assessment, design, and management
Social-economic metabolism
Sustainable production and consumption
Tianchu Lu, MPhil candidate with Dr Anthony Halog at SEES and the Research Group for Industrial Ecology and Circular Economy at UQ, gave a paper presentation on the topic “Towards better practice of life cycle assessment through a system dynamics approach: using interrelationship among environmental sustainability, food system and dietary choice as a case study” at the conference, as part of the presentation session titled Policy Instruments in Industrial Ecology (IE) Models, chaired by Dr Gjalt Huppes and Dr René Kleijn from Leiden University. Presenters at this session talked about the use of system dynamic approaches and agent based modelling as the approaches to both capture real-life complexities and extract abstract system structures to solve IE problems. The session was then joined by Prof Sangwon Suh from University of California, Santa Barbara to discuss the integration of policy instrumentation into IE modelling, and on the inherent limitations in modelling policy instruments.
Throughout the five-day conference, there were some insightful and innovative sessions and presentations that are closely related to the current works of our research at SEES. Below is a quick summarise:
Professor Arnold Tukker from Leiden University, Professor Xuemei Bai from the Australian National University, Dr Vered Blass from Tel Aviv University and Dr Stefan Pauliuk from University of Freiburg gave a talk at the plenary session of Circular Metabolism and Climate, and had passionate discussions with the audience on the reality of circular economy in recent decades and necessary social change for enabling the transformation of global economy from linear to a circular one (picture below).
Another well-known ISIE figure, Prof Marian Chertow from Yale University, chaired and presented at the session of IE and the Sustainable Development Goals, on meeting the challenge of transformation change.
Dr Thomas Wiedmann from University of New South Wales chaired a special session on Developments in Hybrid LCA.
A training course on LCA modelling of waste management systems was offered jointly by Tsinghua University, Beijing Normal University and Technical University of Denmark. The course introduced the scientific theory and systematic method of solid waste life cycle assessment (LCA) and applied the LCA model software of EASETECH. The course provided an introduction to LCA methodology as well as waste management.
There were also several exciting parallel sessions on LCA and circular economy, and on food LCA, where researchers presented their works of combining LCA toolbox with other methods, often modelling methods, to give a life-cycle-based assessment of the environmental impacts of products. The works presented were highly specialised in terms of the products being evaluated, and specific in terms of the system boundaries of LCAs. In discussions throughout the five days, there was a common feeling among the participants that we would like to see more social LCA studies, more studies with broader system boundaries and inclusion of more LCA phases, and studies on data limitations LCA studies. However, there were some interesting presentations on development of transdisciplinary research towards a circular economy and towards sustainability.
The ISIE 2019 conference was an enriching experience that allowed networking with researchers from different but relevant disciplines around the world and communication of research results and interests. This experience provided possibilities for more cooperation on transdisciplinary researches in the future.
