Emission factors
May 20, 2022Circular Economy
June 2, 2022
Industrial Symbiosis (IS) can be defined as a subset of industrial ecology; and describes how a network of diverse organizations can foster eco-innovation and long-term culture change; create and share mutually profitable transactions and improve business and technical processes.
In simple terms, it is a form of brokering to bring companies together in innovative partnerships, finding ways to use the waste from one company as raw materials for another company, while reducing the amount of waste that would normally be directed to landfills.
IS promotes numerous connections between companies (so-called synergies), mostly located with physical proximity to one another, to trade/exchange materials, infrastructures, knowledge, energy, and/or services to promote mutual benefits (environmental, social, and economic).
There are several associated benefits, including:
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More efficient use of energy, leading to cost savings
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Reduction in waste sent to landfill
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Financial benefits, including cost savings
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Emission reductions
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Potential for job creation.
However, for industrial symbiosis to work, there must be a network of participating entities in which the outgoing resources and wastes of some entities matches the incoming or required resources or raw materials of others. This helps keep the resource-process-waste cycle in a continuous loop, to ensure continued reuse of resources.
For this to work effectively, there is need for availability of large amount of usage, production, processing, and output data for analysis from all entities. The analysis would provide opportunities or mechanisms for matching one entity to another within the network or industry. The following are challenges associated with this:
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These data are not readily available or collected
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Available data are collected manually, and analysis are done individually for each symbiosis between two companies.
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Matching of companies and integration of both entities’ systems are done manually.
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These activities are cumbersome and costly to implement manually and individually.
There is need for automation of these activities to maximize the potential of IS for local companies and boost contributions from circular economy to economic development, waste reduction, pollution control, GHG mitigation and consequently, climate change mitigation.
