LINK TO ABSTRACT

One of the signal advances made by this many-sided century has been in invention and industry. In no way has this progress been more vividly shown than in its conquest of waste. Nature, despite her marvelous prodigality, when closely studied, is seen to waste nothing, to use and to re-use all things in unending cycles of activity. At the miraculous feeding of the five thousand, when loaves and fishes were multiplied without sting, it was commanded that the people should gather up the fragments that remained that nothing be lost. This lesson, carried out by Science as an instructive lesson in economy, contains most interesting instances.

--William George Jordan ("Wonders of the World's Waste," The Ladies'Home Journal, October 1897, page 8)

"Industrial ecology" (IE) is an emerging interdisciplinary perspective whose proponents have been based by and large in business and engineering schools. Industrial ecologists adopt a systems approach to study material flows between firms and industries and seek ways to reduce their effects on natural systems. Common among the pioneers of IE was a belief that the institutional constraints of market economies were not conducive to the development of "loop closing," that is, the development of by-product recycling linkages between firms operating in 1 different lines of work. One of their early goals was to devise various public policy measures to correct this alleged market failure (Ayres and Ayres 2002).

Coming from a different academic background, I had independently developed an interest in the history of loop closing and had reached the opposite conclusion on the subject before coming across the IE literature in the late 1990s. I submitted my alternative take on the issue to the Journal of Industrial Ecology and its editors accepted two articles by me. I followed up with additional papers in different outlets exploring other dimensions of the subject (Desrochers 2000; 2002a; 2002b; 2002c; 2004; 2005). In recent years I have explored the history of by-product development in the coal gas, iron making (slag), and synthetic dyes industries (Desrochers 2008b and 2009a), the source material available to document past loop closing (Desrochers 2007; Desrochers and Lam 2007), antecedents to the so-called "Porter Hypothesis" (Desrochers 2008a), the work of Peter Lund Simmonds and Lyon Playfair in promoting by-product development in Victorian England (Desrochers 2009b; 2011) and the history of industrial symbiosis (i.e., geographically localized loop closing) in economic and geographical thought (Desrochers andLeppala, 2010).

In his "History's Lessons: A Critical Assessment of the Desrochers Papers," Frank Boons (2) (2008) criticizes several of my papers published during the years 2000 to 2005. Boons challenges my two main conclusions, namely: 1) loop closing was widespread before 1900; 2) it was overwhelmingly the result of free-market interactions. Boons also criticizes me for failing to incorporate structural, cultural, and political considerations. My conclusions are "overly simple," my policy prescriptions "naive," and my case on behalf of the "market as the preferred coordinating structure to stimulate interfirm recycling" untenable (Boons 2008, 148-149). This reply will revisit my two...