Conference paper

Appeared in: Waste: The Social Context

Editor list: Leonard, J.

Publication year: 2005

Pages: 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 Citation style: 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. Edmonton: Edmonton Waste Management Centre of Excellence (EWMCE). pp. 534-543

APA Citation style: 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. (pp. 534-543). Edmonton Waste Management Centre of Excellence (EWMCE).