Recent progress on innovative eco-industrial development Yong Geng a, * , Tsuyoshi Fujita b , Hung-suck Park c , Anthony S.F. Chiu d , Donald Huisingh e a School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, No. 800 Dongchuan Road, Minhang, Shanghai 200240, China b Center for Social and Environmental Systems Research, National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), 16-2 Onogawa, Tsukuba-City, Ibaraki 305-8506, Japan c Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Ulsan, 102 Dehakro, Ulsan 680-749, Republic of Korea d Center for Engineering & Sustainable Development Research (CESDR), De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines e University of Tennessee, Institute for a Secure and Sustainable Environment, Knoxville, TN, USA article info Article history: Received 12 September 2015 Accepted 13 September 2015 Available online 25 September 2015 Keywords: Regenerative and preventative approaches Eco-industrial development Innovative policies Metric and indicators Tools and methods Integrated framework abstract Due to rapid growth of urban populations and economic development, many countries and regions are facing severe challenges in seeking to respond to environmental pollution at both local and global levels. This Special Volume of the Journal of Cleaner Production reports upon recent progress on regenerative and preventative eco-industrial development (EID), based upon comprehensive reviews, innovative policies, metrics and indicators, tools and methods and the implementation of sustainable production and consumption. The forty-one articles in this Special Volume show that tangible benefits can be achieved from initiatives performed at both local and national levels. The results and recommendations provide critical insights on how to promote innovative eco-industrial development within different contexts. An integrated framework for promoting regenerative and preventative EID is proposed so that powerful synergies for addressing both local environmental quality and global impacts and ways to track these improvements through the governance framework, can be created. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Global human population growth and improvements in living standards have caused significant increases in the production and consumption during the past few decades. That is resulting in resource depletion, environmental emissions, severe smog events and rapidly increasing evidence of dramatic climate change. In or- der to respond to these global challenges, many efforts have been made, such as eco-product-design, cleaner production, improved energy efficiency management, industrial ecology, the application of renewable and clean energy, green procurement, sustainable consumption, etc. All of them encourage an eco-industrial devel- opment (EID) approach, which is a method that has been promoted since the 1990s. The strategies to achieve greater materials and energy efficiency, improved environmental safety and enhanced social integrity, can best function in the context of integrated sys- tems approaches, which are built upon partnerships designed to optimize the use of energy, materials, and community resources (Geng et al., 2014). Currently, many countries are actively promoting eco-industrial development by enacting new regula- tions, initiating pilot projects, providing financial help, supporting research and development and by organizing capacity-building activities. For example, as the largest developing country, China developed and implemented the ‘National Circular Economy Pro- motion Law’, in 2008 and the ‘Cleaner Production Promotion Law’, in 2003. It is a national policy to strive to achieve ecological civi- lization as a national development strategy (Geng et al., 2012). Japan has implemented eco-town projects since 1997 and has supported low carbon development since the 2011 Fukushima crisis (Fujii et al., 2014). South Korea has operated an ambitious fifteen-year, three-phase EIP project under the leadership of the Korea Industrial Complex Corporation (KICOX) since 2005, and released their “low carbon green growth vision” in August 2008 in order to nurture green industry as a new growth engine through the development and diffusion of environmentally friendly tech- nologies (Behera et al., 2012). However, due to the incomplete understanding or even misunderstanding on eco-industrial development, many practi- tioners have focused on how to support reuse or recycling, but pay scant attention on how to ‘prevent the use of virgin materials’. Such a dilemma conflicts with the objectives of eco-industrial develop- ment designed to systematically prevent ecological, economic and * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: ygeng@sjtu.edu.cn, gengyong@iae.ac.cn (Y. Geng). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Cleaner Production journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2015.09.051 0959-6526/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Journal of Cleaner Production 114 (2016) 1e10