Eco-industrial development (EID) and its sub-disciplines—industrial ecology and circular economy—are often seen as game changers of the economic process in science, business, and politics. These approaches are addressed with the hope that the environmental impact of many economic sectors can be massively reduced through EID while traditional lifestyle and consumption patterns are maintained. This assumption has utopian features. Criticism of EID has therefore rightly been voiced, arguing that EID is just “more of the same.” This criticism articulates that although EID discursively postulates that it is a grand redesign of the economic system, it follows the same production and consumption logics as the traditional economy. The article uses a Hegelian dialectic to evaluate the extent to which this criticism is justified, the extent to which it lacks justification, and what a productive synthesis might look like.