Industrial ecology and waste infrastructure development: A roadmap for the Dutch waste management system

Decision-making on waste infrastructures is difficult because waste management is a complex, politically loaded and emotionally charged issue that is neither well structured, nor well understood. While sustainability is the ultimate goal of the EU environmental policy, there is no commonly accepted approach for its realisation. Industrial ecology has been suggested as a roadmap to sustainability. Its prescriptive tier can provide organising principles for more sustainable practices: closed material cycles, cascaded energy use and flexible system configuration. The engineering concepts, grade and recovery, provide a simple yet powerful means to assess policies and infrastructure concepts with respect to sustainability. When combined, industrial ecology and engineering yield sound infrastructure design specifications and decision-making support for waste infrastructure.