2017 Industrial Ecology Winter Seminar and Graduate Student Forum on Sustainable Use of Natural Resources was held in the Institute of Urban Environment (IUE), CAS on December 21-22, 2017. The symposium was jointly organized by IUE, CAS and the environmental college of Nanjing university.
Dr. Graedel Thomas, academician of the American academy of engineering, Yale university; Dr. Yan Lin, professor of Norwegian national institute of water research; Dr. Minpeng Chen, professor of Renmin University of China; and Dr. Chuan-bin Zhou, associate professor of Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, CAS gave public speeches at the symposium. Dr. Thomas introduced current situation and challenges in the metal resource recycling technology. Dr. Lin discussed the emerging issues of the global environment of marine garbage and plastic objects. Then, Dr. Chen gave a speech on the United Nations framework convention on climate changes, as well as different situations in the climate negotiations. Lastly, Dr. Zhou presented the current situation of human society demand and dependence on biomass and the future scenarios. These reports delivered the development and applications in the field of industrial ecology from subject development, environmental impact, social demand and political game perspectives. Seminar performed a broad vision on fields of interest to students and showed great potential of the development of industrial ecology.
The conference set up a postgraduate forum on the theme of Sustainable Use of Natural Resources, which attracted the interest of many outstanding students and scholars. Sixteen outstanding graduate students from more than ten well-known universities, including Tsinghua University, Peking University and Nagoya University gave high-quality academic reports. There were more than forty young scholars and students registered to attend the conference. The reports not only covered the core research areas of industrial ecology, such as life cycle assessment, material flow analysis, product recycling, and eco-industrial parks, but also a number of aspects related to Sustainable Use of Natural Resources from a broader perspective.
The seminar and postgraduate forum have enhanced mutual understanding among multidisciplinary scientists, and promoted in-depth communication and follow-up cooperation between research teams and scholars, which are conducive to the further development and growth of industrial ecology in China. Postgraduate forum organizing committee members were from Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing University, Peking University, Tsinghua University, Beijing Normal University, Shanghai Jiaotong University and Nanjing Normal University. The organizing committee decided to set the forum as an annual event that will be routinizing the election of new committee members and the host of activities.