Exploring the emergence of waste recovery and exchange in industrial clusters

Self-organized industrial symbiosis (IS) starts with one actor's decision to invest in a waste recovery plant and the other actors' decision to buy the recovered flow. Technical and institutional conditions of the cluster influence actors' decisions. This paper explores the emergence of IS collaborations in industrial clusters under different techno-economic conditions in the long term. We propose a mixed-integer linear programming model that incorporates costs and constraints associated with waste recovery and exchange to study actors' investment decisions and investigate shaped symbiotic exchanges under rising energy prices and limited electricity supply. The approach is implemented in Iran's Persian Gulf Mining and Metals Special Economic Zone as a case study. The results revealed that changes in internal or external condition simultaneously influence the industrial and waste recovery plants. For instance, increasing energy prices without raising product prices significantly decreased the production level of industrial plants and, consequently, heat recovery potential. Furthermore, the waste heat recovery plants' contribution to improving the cluster's economic and environmental performance was not the same. Electricity recovery from a power plant's waste heat can result in 55 PJ grid electricity intake reduction and 720 M€ cluster cash flow increase. Recovered cooling or electricity from the steelmaking plant waste heat was consumed internally rather than shaping IS. These model outcomes show its capability to study IS within the socio-technical structure of the cluster, not a standalone phenomenon. Implemented conceptualization offers a novel system-level approach, which could be adjusted to assess other industrial development strategies.     

Assessing the “Short Mental Distance” in Eco‐Industrial Networks

Like many economic exchanges, industrial symbiosis (IS) is thought to be influenced by social relationships and shared norms among actors in a network. While many implicit references to social characteristics exist throughout the literature, there have been few explicit attempts to operationalize and measure the concepts. The “short mental distance,”“trust,”“openness,” and “communication” recorded among managers in Kalundborg, Denmark, set a precedent for examining and encouraging social interactions among key personnel in the dozens of eco‐industrial networks around the world. In this article we explore the relationships among various aspects of social embeddedness, social capital, and IS. We develop a conceptual framework and an approach using quantitative and qualitative methods to identify and measure these social characteristics, including social network structure, communication, and similarities in norms and conceptions of waste, and apply them in an industrial network in Nanjangud, South India. The findings suggest that there is a fairly high level of shared norms about dealing with waste—the “short mental distance”—in this network, but by‐product transactions are only weakly correlated with the structure and content of communication among managers. Replication of this approach can increase the understanding and comparability of the role of social characteristics in eco‐industrial activities around the world.     

Industrial Symbiosis Dynamics and the Problem of Equivalence: Proposal for a Comparative Framework

Industrial symbiosis (IS), one of the founding notions within the field of industrial ecology, has diffused throughout significant parts of the world as a practice that can reduce the ecological impact of the industrial processes of groups of firms. In this article, we propose a fresh look at this research topic, building on the considerable advances that have been made in the last 15 years in understanding how IS comes about. We propose a conceptual and theoretical framework for taking on the challenge of comparative analysis at a global level. This requires developing an approach to address a solution to the problem of equivalence: the difficulty of comparing instances of IS across different institutional contexts. The proposed framework emphasizes IS as a process and attempts to address the obstacles to comparative study by (1) identifying terminology to examine IS variants, (2) providing a typology of IS dynamics, and (3) formulating key research questions to illuminate a way forward. In developing our argument, we build on the collective experiences of collaborative research efforts in North America, Europe, and Asia as evidenced in recent overviews of the literature.     

Industrial symbiosis in the forestry sector: A case study in southern Brazil

Industrial symbiosis (IS) is an important concept in the field of industrial ecology that has disseminated worldwide as a practice to decrease the ecological impact of industrial processes through the exchange of by‐products and waste between units in a system. The forestry industry is the main economic activity in the region of Lages in southern Brazil. IS relationships have expanded with the use of waste material from wood processing and strengthened cooperation between companies in different sectors. The aims of this article were to: a) quantify the level of IS in the system, b) identify the benefits of IS for participants, and c) explain why the network further developed IS to the formation of an industrial ecosystem. A questionnaire was administered during visits to 24 forestry companies in order to analyze their products and processes, commercial relations, positive impacts, and local insertion. The industrial symbiosis indicator (ISI) was determined using waste stream data from the system to represent the level of symbiosis among the companies in this region. The results show that the companies participate in a symbiotic network, mainly involving the exchange of chips, bark, sawdust and shavings. In most cases, these exchanges occur between nearby companies, constituting an extensive industrial ecosystem.     

Enhancing institutional capacity in a centralized state: The case of industrial water use efficiency in Vietnam

This article uses an institutional capacity framework to assess the interplay between the macro level institutional environment in the form of the centralized Vietnamese state, and the meso level institutional capacity of three different industrial zones to develop technological water use efficiency strategies. Our results show that the relational, knowledge, and mobilization capacities of these industrial zones are constrained by the centralized nature of the Vietnamese state. These industrial zones also show a limited capacity to instigate reform of macro level regulatory institutions. However, we also find instances where industrial zones do demonstrate capacity for implementing water use efficiency technologies because of their capacity to coordinate relations with client firms, universities, and provincial industrial zone authorities. If the institutional capacities of industrial zones are better supported, we argue there remains room for them to influence the macro institutional context to support innovation in water use efficiency. Our results indicate the value of institutional capacity as a framework for assessing processes of technical innovation for industrial ecology, especially in the context of centralized states.     

Promoting Industrial Symbiosis: Using the Concept of Proximity to Explore Social Network Development

Industrial symbiosis (IS) has been identified as a strategy for promoting industrial sustainability. IS has been defined as the development of close working agreements between industrial and other organizations that, through the innovative reuse, recycling, or sharing of resources, leads to resource efficiency. Key to IS are innovation and social network development. This article critically reviews IS literature and concludes that, to inform proactive strategies for promoting IS, the understanding of the social processes leading to resource innovation needs to be improved. Industrial ecologists generally believe that close geographical proximity and trust are essential to the development of IS. This article argues, however, that there is a need to learn more about the meaning of, need for, and specific role of geographical proximity and trust in IS and, additionally, that other potentially important social factors have remained underexplored. To move IS research forward, this article suggests to engage with research in economic geography on the concept of ‘proximity,’ which draws attention to the ways in which geographical, cognitive, institutional, social, and organizational distances between actors might affect innovation. Arguably, the analytically distinct, but flexible, dimensions of proximity can be useful to explore how and why IS develops. The resulting qualitative knowledge would form a basis for researching whether general patterns for IS development exist and, more important, could inform public and private strategies that indicate which actions could be taken, as well as when and in what way to promote resource synergies and sustainable industrial development.     

Analyzing the Environmental Benefits of Industrial Symbiosis

Studies of industrial symbiosis (IS) focus on the physical flows of materials and energy in local industrial systems. In an ideal IS, waste material and energy are shared or exchanged among the actors of the system, thereby reducing the consumption of virgin material and energy inputs, and likewise the generation of waste and emissions. In this study, the environmental impacts of an industrial ecosystem centered around a pulp and paper mill and operating as an IS are analyzed using life cycle assessment (LCA). The system is compared with two hypothetical reference systems in which the actors would operate in isolation. Moreover, the system is analyzed further in order to identify possibilities for additional links between the actors. The results show that of the total life cycle impacts of the system, upstream processes made the greatest overall contribution to the results. Comparison with stand‐alone production shows that in the case studied, the industrial symbiosis results in modest improvements, 5% to 20% in most impact categories, in the overall environmental impacts of the system. Most of the benefits occur upstream through heat and electricity production for the local town. All in all it is recommended that when the environmental impacts of industrial symbiosis are assessed, the impacts occurring upstream should also be studied, not only the impacts within the ecosystem.     

Applying Industrial Symbiosis to Smallholder Farms

The study of industrial symbiosis (IS) has largely focused on the exchange of energy and materials among industrial processes in an effort to increase value and reduce environmental impact. Agricultural systems, particularly those located in developing countries, can benefit from the principles of IS. Relatively few studies have analyzed the potential benefits of integrated material and energy flows in smallholder farming, even though these systems are considered essential to the world's food supply and poverty reduction. Although the concepts can be applied to virtually any system, the study of industrial symbiosis has traditionally focused on industrialized systems in developed countries. The research presented here applies the principles of IS to smallholder farms using optimization techniques to maximize farm output while minimizing wastes. Our research links IS to the growing field of integrated farming research (IFR), which seeks to create new technologies that increase the production of farms by viewing the farm as a system. Bridging these fields enriches the potential for robust research outcomes in both areas and fills a current knowledge gap. IS benefits from exploring new applications and increasing its penetration into the developing world. IFR benefits from established IS tools to create alternate pathways for increased output based on symbiotic relationships. A small farming system in Liberia, West Africa, is used as a case study. System integration of individual unit processes shows increased productivity and decreased waste. The results of this analysis indicate that there are unrealized opportunities for IS in developing countries, and integration of IS techniques into smallholder farming operations has the potential for impacting sustainable development.     

Understanding the Evolution of Industrial Symbiosis Research

This study analyzes the evolution of the research field of industrial symbiosis (IS). We elucidate its embedding in industrial ecology (IE), trace the development of research themes, and reveal the evolution of the research network through analysis of the core literature and journals that appeared from 1997 to 2012 by citation analysis, cocitation analysis, and network analysis. In the first period (1997–2005), IS research held a minority share in the IE literature. The research revolved around the concept of IS, the assessment of eco‐industrial park projects, and the establishment of waste treatment and recycling networks. In the second period (2006–2012), diverse research approaches and theories enriched the field, which has led to a maturation in theory building. Our findings clearly illustrate that IS evolved from practice‐oriented research toward coherent theory building through a systematic underpinning and linking of diverse topics. As scientific attention shifted from exploring a phenomenon to elucidating underlying mechanisms, IS knowledge found worldwide practical implementation. The coauthorship network shows that the academic communities of IS are distributed worldwide and that international collaboration is widespread. Through bibliometric and network analysis of IS, we have created a systemic, quantitative image of the evolution of the IS research field and community, which gives IS researchers an underpinned overview of the IS research and may help them to identify new directions and synergy in worldwide research.     

Diversity and Connectance in an Industrial Context

The ecological metaphor of industrial ecology is a proven conceptual tool, having spawned an entire field of interdisciplinary research that explores the intimate linkages between industry and its underlying natural systems. Besides its name and a number of borrowed concepts, however, industrial ecology has no formal relationship with the ecological sciences. This study explores the potential for further interdisciplinary collaboration by testing whether some of the same quantitative analysis techniques used in community ecology research can have meaning in an industrial context. Specifically, we applied the ecological concepts of connectance and diversity to an analysis of Burnside Industrial Park in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Our results demonstrate that these ecological tools show promise for use in industrial ecology. We discuss the meaning of connectance and diversity concepts in an industrial context and suggest next steps for future studies. We hope that this research will help to lay the groundwork of an ecologically inspired tool kit for analyzing industrial ecosystems.     

A Process Perspective on Industrial Symbiosis

It has been long recognized in the conceptual literature that industrial symbiosis requires a perspective that focuses on long‐term evolution. This has not yet been matched by adopting an adequate process‐oriented research methodology. This article provides the underpinnings for such a methodology, presents a developed methodology, event sequence analysis, and shows its added value through a set of research questions and an empirical example. It shows how the process perspective leads to asking new research questions as well as the uncovering of new insights about the emergence, evolution, and dissolution of symbiotic relationships and the institutional capacity required to build such relationships.     

Industrial Wastes and By‐products as Alternative Fuels in Cement Plants: Evaluation of an Industrial Symbiosis Option

A ravenous fuel consumer, the cement industry may substitute fossil fuels by industrial wastes and by‐products, identifying the industry as a key example of industrial symbiosis (IS). Benefits from industrial waste alternative fuels (IWAFs) include safe disposal, fossil fuel cost savings, gate fees, and greenhouse gas credits. Poor IWAFs, (high moisture, ash and halogen content) bring higher gate fees, but lessen clinker production. Thermal rating and blower capacity constraints should be satisfied in such a case study of IS. Cement plants must comply with potentially tighter emission limits, compared to fossil fuel utilization, despite higher pollutant precursors in IWAFs. Emissions’ compliance, operational, and production implications are a few among several challenges when assessing multiple IWAF valorization as a symbiotic option from a systems’ perspective. A novel method is proposed to quantitatively assess critical trade‐offs. Species and energy transformations convey a rigorous picture of clinker level, kiln flue gas, and offgas volumes and lay the groundwork for screening, a priori selection, and process tuning. Necessary and sufficient compliance conditions and safety margins are presented in terms of process parameters and actual emissions’ data. Main challenges posed by high flue gas, high offgas volumes, high moisture, low heating value, increased nitrogen oxides emissions, and high halogen and metal content are quantified. As demonstrated in a case study of an actual 1.5 × 10⁶ tonnes per annum clinker plant in this paper, concurrent use of several IWAFs may increase clinker production, while satisfying operational constraints and maintaining compliance. The method may serve for devising IWAF preparation, or tuning mechanisms expanding IWAF valorization.     

Understanding the Organization of Industrial Ecosystems

Industrial symbiosis (IS) has been used to describe the physical exchange and shared management of input and output materials by geographically proximate firms. Firms that engage in IS are said to belong to an industrial ecosystem. Symbiosis has been found to be motivated by economic considerations, such as lowering costs for waste disposal, as well as by environmental ones, such as accessing limited water supplies. Communication and trust among managers are thought to play important roles in exchanges; however, empirical studies have not been previously conducted. This study used social network analysis (SNA) to identify the prevalence of industrial symbiosis linkages in Barceloneta, Puerto Rico. The study quantified patterns in various relationships among firms and managers, including formal relations through supply chains, and informal ones through interpersonal interactions. SNA and statistical methods were used to explore how these ties correlate with observed industrial symbiosis activities. IS linkages were found to be less prevalent than product sales among firms and were concentrated among pharmaceutical firms at the core of the regional network. Trust among managers and position in the social hierarchy were found to be correlated with IS but not supply chain links. SNA was useful for examining the organization of different relationships in the industrial ecosystem, but contextual information is still needed to add meaning to its findings.     

Realizing responsibility. Institutional routines,critical intervention,and the “big” questions in the controversy over non-invasive prenatal testing in Germany

NIPT has become a matter of controversy in Germany over the past years, there is now a widespread concern that it raises fundamental social and ethical questions. Starting from the assumption that responsible governance requires governance actors to address these questions, the article examines how the main governance actors realized their responsibility in the sense of conceiving and performing it. Building on the pragmatic sociology of critique, we study how actors are doing responsibility within a given institutional and political context. We show that critical interventions disrupted institutional routines and caused governance actors to struggle with conflicting commitments of complying with institutional rules and exercising responsibility by taking social and ethical considerations into account. Whereas these conflicting commitments posed a predicament for political decision-makers, who solved it through shifting responsibility for social and ethical issues elsewhere, there was no such predicament for the producers; for them, routine and responsibility converged.     

Scaling‐Up of Industrial Symbiosis in the Korean National Eco‐Industrial Park Program: Examining Its Evolution over the 10 Years between 2005–2014

In 2005, South Korea initiated the 15‐year National Eco‐Industrial Park Development Program in three stages to gradually transform aged industrial complexes into eco‐industrial parks (EIPs) by promoting industrial symbiosis (IS). Building upon the pilot experiences from the first 5 years, the second phase of the program focused on the scaling‐up of IS at a broader regional level. Key scaling‐up strategies included the expansion of target areas by connecting multiple industrial complexes, the standardization of processes and dissemination of learning, and the development of large‐scale projects that could contribute to the regional development. In this study, we examined the evolution of IS over the last 10 years between 2005 and 2014, primarily to understand the characteristics and impact of these scaling‐up strategies. Our findings showed that the scale of IS in the second phase had increased in various aspects in comparison to that in the first phase. The number of operating projects had increased from 52 to 159, the number of participating firms increased from 90 to 596, and the average distance of IS increased from 40 to 48 kilometers. The size of economic and environmental benefits also increased along with an increase in the private investment and government research funding. We further analyzed the role of the regional EIP centers as facilitators, how their activities influenced the scaling‐up of IS, and discussed the characteristics of the Korea's approach to IS.     

Using an Industrial Waste Account to Facilitate National Level Industrial Symbioses by Uncovering the Waste Exchange Potential

The identification of potential by‐product exchanges is important for fostering industrial symbiosis. To discover these potential exchanges, this article extends the analysis of local industrial symbiosis to a national scale. A waste input‐output table, which is a material flow accounting tool, was compiled and used as a database to examine the existing exchanges of by‐products. The supplies and demands of industrial wastes or by‐products were compared to highlight their potential use for promoting higher exchange flows. The analysis of the linkages indicated that the majority of each of the by‐products were reused by the few industries that had the technology and operational capacity for reuse. This finding is useful for determining which industries are good candidates for promoting further industrial symbiosis (IS). Based on a nation‐wide analysis that considered the industrial characteristics of Taiwan comprehensively, 23 types of major by‐products with greater reuse flows and 216 potential exchange patterns were identified between the industries. In addition, three types of eco‐industrial networks were characterized as follows according to their dominant types: (1) fossil fuel, metal, and mineral‐dominated; (2) agricultural and synthetic material‐dominated; and (3) information and communications technology (ICT) and chemical industry‐dominated eco‐industrial networks. This analysis highlights the resource exchange potentials and provides information to new firms for networking with existing businesses.     

Synergy Management Services Companies: A New Business Model for Industrial Park Operators

The concept of industrial symbiosis (IS) was introduced decades ago and its environmental and economic benefits are well established, but the broad acceptance of IS still faces significant barriers. This article provides a new approach to capture synergies within industrial parks by suggesting a new business model. Building on findings from a survey conducted by the authors and on literature, we first identify potential barriers to low‐carbon synergistic projects. Economic concerns of technically feasible synergies and financial issues turn out to be the largest barriers, because of long payback periods and fluctuating raw material and by‐product market prices. Existing business models do not offer easy ways to overcome or relax these barriers. We therefore introduce the concept of a synergy management services company (SMSCO), a synergy contractor and third‐party financing model, to overcome these barriers. This model shifts the financial risk of the synergistic project from collaborating firms to the SMSCO. We posit that this attribute of the SMSCO model makes it attractive for industrial park operators who seek long‐term solutions to secure future viability of their park.     

Redefining Industrial Symbiosis

The most commonly cited definition of industrial symbiosis (IS), by Chertow (2000) , has served well to foster discussion and research for more than a decade. The definition reflected the state of research and practice at the time; as both have advanced, some terms have been interpreted in substantially different ways. In this article we analyze those generally used terms for their connection to the ecological metaphor that is the root of industrial ecology, and their varied interpretations in IS research and practice over time. We then propose an updated definition intended to communicate the essence of IS as a tool for innovative green growth: IS engages diverse organizations in a network to foster eco‐innovation and long‐term culture change. Creating and sharing knowledge through the network yields mutually profitable transactions for novel sourcing of required inputs and value‐added destinations for non‐product outputs, as well as improved business and technical processes. We posit that, although geographic proximity is often associated with IS, it is neither necessary nor sufficient—nor is a singular focus on physical resource exchange.