Sammelbandbeitrag

Erschienen in: Waste: The Social Context : Conference Proceedings, May 11 -14 2005, Edmonton

Herausgeberliste: Leonard, J.

Jahr der Veröffentlichung: 2005

Seiten: 534-543

Abstract: 
From the point of view of ecological economics nature provides the
service of decomposing organics into nutrients to the benefit of humans.
As a natural process and partly supported by costly human preparation
for natural processes such as composting, manure collection, etc.,
natural organisms seemingly do the job of fertilizing soils for free.
Humans have traditionally built complex interactions on this capacity to
get nutrients back from settlements to fields at minimal costs. In
contrast, in modern agriculture, nature services have been strongly
substituted, for instance, by mineral fertilizer. As a consequence the
initially strongly positive energetic balance of agriculture has come to
parity, and organics are dumped. There is a dispute whether modern
practices are sustainable. An evaluation is needed. But it is difficult
to evaluate services on a market basis, because energy is cheap. We will
discuss how nature services can be evaluated more correctly on the
basis of a joint concept of integrated evaluation. This concept is based
on a principal-agent framework. It allows us to reassess energy based
agriculture versus recycling agriculture. We follow a tradition of
Liebig who has suggested that urban wastes should be recycled to rural
areas and, in modern words, that entropy optimized systems are more
sustainable than energy rich systems.

Harvard-Zitierstil: Nuppenau, E. (2005) An ecological economic analysis of nature's service to recycle waste: On matter flows, potentials, modelling and evaluation of nutrient cycles, in Leonard, J. (ed.) Waste: The Social Context : Conference Proceedings, May 11 -14 2005, Edmonton. Edmonton: Edmonton Waste Management Centre of Excellence (EWMCE), pp. 534-543

APA-Zitierstil: Nuppenau, E. (2005). An ecological economic analysis of nature's service to recycle waste: On matter flows, potentials, modelling and evaluation of nutrient cycles. In Leonard, J. (Ed.), Waste: The Social Context : Conference Proceedings, May 11 -14 2005, Edmonton (pp. 534-543). Edmonton Waste Management Centre of Excellence (EWMCE).