摘要：In recent years, the field of environmental management of industrial activities has been causing a great interest among scientists. This paper discusses the notion of entropy and the relationship of entropy to environmental management of industrial activities. In the paper, two case studies of Eco-Industrial Networks are presented: the case of aluminium and that of copper. The analysis of case studies made clear, firstly, that the production of aluminium or copper by recycling new scrap generates significantly less specific entropy than the production of the same product from primary raw materials and, secondly, that the effort of closing the loops of material flows aiming at complete recycling leads to higher generation of specific entropy than those which correspond to the use of primary raw materials. It is proven that there exists an entropy limit of environmental effectiveness when recycling each product. The present paper comments on this limit.
