Supporting pillars for industrial ecosystems

Burnside Industrial Park encompasses an area of 1200 hectares with 1300 businesses and approximately 20 000 people in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Although never designed and constructed as a functioning ecosystem, the park contains many of the elements and characteristics of such a system, with diversity, resiliency, stability and integrity. Webs must be strengthened into nested hierarchies of subsystems guided by information functioning in positive and negative feedback systems. In ecological terms, a wider range of symbionts, metamorphs, polymorphs and hybrids must be established or developed. Support systems that will facilitate an ecosystem approach include an information network and clearing-house, a materials exchange network, environmental audit team, an educational program, an applied research program and a balance of regulatory and economic instruments.