Orla Feherty
Industrial Ecology Researcher and Writer
Orla writes about how materials move through industrial systems — where they come from, where they go, and what gets lost along the way. Her articles draw on peer-reviewed research and field observation, not frameworks built for press releases.
What she works on
Industrial ecology sits between engineering, environmental science, and economics. Orla's writing occupies that same space — close to the data, sceptical of easy answers.
Her background is in resource management and environmental systems analysis. For the past several years she has spent a lot of time with material flow accounts, life cycle inventories, and the recurring gap between what circular economy strategies promise and what industrial metabolisms actually allow. The gap is worth documenting carefully.
Rendkup started in 2025 as a place to publish that documentation. The focus is deliberately narrow: industrial systems, material stocks and flows, waste as a resource signal, and the physical constraints that shape what is genuinely possible in resource transition. No abstract sustainability positioning — the site stays close to measurable, reported phenomena.
Topics covered at Rendkup
Each article on the site addresses one specific aspect of industrial ecology — not the full concept, but the part that resists simplification.
Industrial Symbiosis
How waste streams from one process become inputs for another — and where the logistics, contracts, and contamination levels actually constrain this in practice.
Urban Mining
The recoverable material locked in buildings, infrastructure, and electronic equipment — and the economic conditions under which recovery becomes viable rather than aspirational.
Material Flow Analysis
Reading national and sectoral MFA datasets to understand where bulk materials accumulate, where losses occur, and what those numbers say about the structure of production systems.