Economics has its roots formed in the nineteenth century back when the industrial revolution had just began. Economics mostly dealt with the balance of accounts at the end of each year, but it can be said that ecological and economical concepts can be tied together and can work in a sync since.

Economics and ecology both work with some very basic fundamentals, much needed for their stability and functionality. Nature starts with reproduction, growth, death and this goes on and on and perpetuates century after century. Both characteristics and composition might change but we see that there is always some informational content that remains the same irrespective of any such change. It is this very informational content that defines the broader aspect of the relationship between economics and ecology and the structure and organization that follows thereafter.

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Many of us have studied what ecology is in our environmental studies class. But before we jump into the discussion of what exactly ecology is and how it affects the environment, we need to know what an ecosystem is as an ecology is nothing but basically a subset of an ecosystem.

An ecosystem is one of the major important aspects that one needs to study. To start of with the discussion, we define an ecosystem as a specific area that comprises of biological life of all different forms and species existing in the specific environment. It should be importantly noted that we talk about a specific environment here, therefore about all the physical components that make up the environment like air, water, soil etc. All play a very major role. It should be also well noted that the most common factors that can possibly affect an ecosystem are composition, diversity, amount of biomass etc.

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Before understanding how industrial ecology is helping the ecosystem one must get clear about the concept of industrial ecology. Industrial ecology is the study of material and energy flows through industrial systems. The industry can be seen as an intercorrelated series of processes that extract resources from the Earth and transform those resources into commodities at humanity disposal. Industrial ecology wants to quantify these material flows and optimize the industrial processes in such a way to guarantee their environmental sustainability. Main topics are therefore how industrial activities impact on the environment in relation with planet’s supply of natural resources and waste disposal, and involve engineering, economics, sociology, toxicology and the natural sciences.

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