Marian Chertow [profile], center, associate professor of industrial environmental management at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, discussed her research in industrial ecology at a gathering of Hawaiian business leaders and 40 Yale alumni at the Pacific Club in Honolulu. The October event was sponsored by Connie Lau, right, president and CEO of Hawaiian Electric Industries and American Savings Bank and a Yale College graduate, and Matt Hamabata, executive director of the Kohala Center, a nonprofit academic research institute.

Chertow studies how businesses cluster in places as varied as Hawaii, Puerto Rico and mainland China. She has recently proposed a new approach to encouraging corporate greening: Map the symbioses—the waste, water and power exchanges and other beneficial relationships—that exist among businesses. Show companies that they have already begun to build industrial ecosystems. Then help them to do more of the same. “Business people just want to know the rules of the game so that they can go out and play hard,” said Chertow. “If we have green rules, then they can go play the green game hard.”

While researching the Campbell Industrial Park near Honolulu, Chertow’s team found that eight companies were trading seven different kinds of materials among themselves. Yet companies remained oblivious to the big picture: They weren’t aware of what their neighbors were doing or how they might benefit even more from sharing resources. She has found similar exchanges taking place in a very different context, a large industrial complex in China, and now leads Yale’s new Program on Industrial Ecology in Developing Countries.