"Uncovering" Industrial Symbiosis Chertow, Marian R.
Journal of industrial ecology,
January 2007, Letnik:
11, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Summary
Since 1989, efforts to understand the nature of interfirm resource sharing in the form of industrial symbiosis and to replicate in a deliberate way what was largely self‐organizing in ...Kalundborg, Denmark have followed many paths, some with much success and some with very little. This article provides a historical view of the motivations and means for pursuing industrial symbiosis—defined to include physical exchanges of materials, energy, water, and by‐products among diversified clusters of firms. It finds that “uncovering” existing symbioses has led to more sustainable industrial development than attempts to design and build eco‐industrial parks incorporating physical exchanges.
By examining 15 proposed projects brought to national and international attention by the U.S. President's Council on Sustainable Development beginning in the early 1990s, and contrasting these with another 12 projects observed to share more elements of self‐organization, recommendations are offered to stimulate the identification and uncovering of already existing “kernels” of symbiosis. In addition, policies and practices are suggested to identify early‐stage precursors of potentially larger symbioses that can be nurtured and developed further. The article concludes that environmentally and economically desirable symbiotic exchanges are all around us and now we must shift our gaze to find and foster them.
Reducing food waste is widely recognized as critical for improving resource efficiency and meeting the nutritional demand of a growing human population. Here we explore whether the sharing economy ...can provide meaningful assistance to reducing food waste in a relatively low-impact and environmentally-sound way. Analyzing 170,000 postings on a popular peer-to-peer food-sharing app, we find that over 19 months, 90t of food waste with an equivalent retail value of £0.7 million were collected by secondary consumers and diverted from disposal. An environmental analysis focused on Greater London reveals that these exchanges were responsible for avoiding emission of 87-156t of CO
eq. Our results indicate that most exchanges were among users associated with lower income yet higher levels of education. These findings, together with the high collection rates (60% on average) suggest that the sharing economy may offer powerful means for improving resource efficiency and reducing food waste.
This study advances contemporary ideas promoting the importance of managing wastes as resources such as closed-loop or circular material economies, and sustainable materials management by reinforcing ...the notion of a resource-based paradigm rather than a waste-based one. It features the creation of a quantitative tool, the “reuse potential indicator” to specify how “resource-like” versus how “waste-like” specific materials are on a continuum. Even with increasing attention to waste reuse and resource conservation, constant changes in product composition and complexity have left material managers without adequate guidance to make decisions about what is technically feasible to recover from the discard stream even before markets can be considered. The reuse potential indicator is developed to aid management decision-making about waste based not on perception but more objectively on the technical ability of the materials to be reused in commerce. This new indicator is based on the extent of technological innovation and commercial application of actual reuse approaches identified and cataloged.
Coal combustion by-products (CCBs) provide the test case for calculating the reuse potential indicator. While CCBs are often perceived as wastes and then isolated in landfills or surface impoundments, there is also a century-long history in the industry of developing technologies to reuse CCBs. The recent statistics show that most CCBs generated in Europe and Japan are reused (90–95%), but only 40–45% of CCBs are used in the United States. According to the reuse potential calculation, however, CCBs in the United States have high technical reusability. Of the four CCBs examined under three different regulatory schemes, reuse potential for boiler slag and flue-gas desulfurization gypsum maintains a value greater than 0.8 on a 0–1 scale, indicating they are at least 80% resource-like. Under current regulation in the United States, both fly ash and bottom ash are 80–90% resource-like. Very strict regulation would remove many reuse options decreasing potential for these two CCBs to 30% resource-like. A more holistic view of waste and broad application of the new indicator would make clear what technologies are available and assist public and private decision makers in setting quantitative material reuse targets from a new knowledge base that reinforces a resource-based paradigm.
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•New tools are needed to operationalize the move to view wastes as resources.•The proposed reuse potential indicator quantifies technical reusability.•The tool specifies a continuum of how resource-like or waste-like materials are.•Coal combustion by-products (CCBs) provided the test case for the new indicator.•CCBs in the U.S. in 2009 were 80% resource-like in a base case but reuse was 41%.
Summary
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.
Previous bibliometric analyses of industrial symbiosis (IS) research have focused on a limited body of literature owing to the scope of keyword searches or limitations of library databases. This ...study seeks to apply bibliometrics to explore broader, epistemological questions, particularly about the structure and geospatial development of IS as a sub‐field of industrial ecology. We also evaluate the benefits of using Google Scholar, in addition to the conventional databases Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus, for better understanding academic domains. By using WoS and Scopus, 805 articles on IS that met our criteria were identified, published in 212 journals from 1995 through 2018. On average, the cumulative number of relevant articles grew at an exponential rate of 18% per year—more than double the estimated growth of global scientific output. We observed the largest increases in articles that: (1) model the material and energy flows in IS clusters; (2) propose strategies and ideas for implementing symbiosis; and (3) evaluate the performance of IS networks. By the end of 2018, 54 countries were featured in IS articles retrieved from WoS and Scopus, with China as the single most studied country. The analysis of Google Scholar suggested that it can capture more IS articles than the conventional databases owing to its unique characteristic of searching the entire text of documents rather than solely their metadata as with WoS and Scopus. Google Scholar revealed IS discourse from additional countries and disciplines previously omitted, enabling a more acute view of its patterns of diffusion.
•The recovery potential of waste flows in the global paper life cycle is estimated.•An ideal life cycle features complete fulfilment of the recovery potential of waste.•The Recycled Input Rate (RIR) ...is 38% in 2012 and 67–73% in the ideal life cycle.•The landfill intensity may be reduced from 331–473 kg/t paper to 0–2.6 kg/t paper.•The results reflect optimistic assumptions and maximum technical possibilities.
Waste from the global paper life cycle can be a lost economic opportunity and a risk to the natural environment and human health. This study assesses the recovery potential of major waste flows in the global paper life cycle to support improvements in material use. The “recovery potential” indicator shows the technical possibility for extracting value from waste through recycling and other forms of recovery. The potential is identified through a review of recovery technologies that are currently applied or likely to be commercially available by the year 2050. The analysis compares current material use in the global paper life cycle with an ideal scenario in which the recovery potential of all major waste flows is fulfilled. In the ideal scenario, the Recycled Input Ratio (RIR) is increased from 38% to 67%–73% and the landfill intensity is reduced from 331–473 kg/t paper to 0–2.6 kg/t paper. The reduction in required landfill space is achieved mainly through increased consumer waste recycling. Better management of industrial waste from the paper sector has a rather limited impact on the RIR and landfill intensity. The conditions for successful recovery of waste are discussed separately. The analysis shows that the recovery potential indicator can be usefully applied to estimate potential improvements in complex material systems and the findings may inform policies for resource efficiency and the circular economy.
Using nonhazardous wastes as inputs to production creates environmental benefits by avoiding disposal impacts, mitigating manufacturing impacts, and conserving virgin resources. China has ...incentivized reuse since the 1980s through the “Comprehensive Utilization of Resources (CUR)” policy. To test whether and to what extent environmental benefits are generated, 862 instances in Jiangsu, China are analyzed, representing eight industrial sectors and 25 products that qualified for tax relief through CUR. Benefits are determined by comparing life cycle inventories for the same product from baseline and CUR-certified production, adjusted for any difference in the use phase. More than 50 million tonnes of solid wastes were reused, equivalent to 51% of the provincial industrial total. Benefits included reduction of 161 petajoules of energy, 23 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, 75 000 tonnes of SO2 equivalent, 33 000 tonnes of NO X , and 28 000 tonnes of PM10 equivalent, which were 2.5%–7.3% of the provincial industrial consumption and emissions. The benefits vary substantially across industries, among products within the same industry, and when comparing alternative reuse processes for the same waste. This first assessment of CUR results shows that CUR has established a firm foundation for a circular economy, but also suggest additional opportunities to refine incentives under CUR to increase environmental gain.
This paper links theoretical perspectives from energy efficiency economics with those observed from corporate environmental strategy to develop a framework for explaining energy efficiency strategies ...by firms in response to national policies and local regulations in China. The framework is refined through analytic generalization of 20 cases from four industries and four cities in Jiangsu Province, and reveals two strategies: 1) firms with moderate institutional pressure seek incremental competitiveness by adopting energy-saving technologies, which is reinforced by their informational, organizational, and financing capabilities, and facilitated by voluntary policies and industrial competition; 2) firms with survival risk or development constraints under regulation seek a position favored by local governments by replacing old plant and equipment with larger, more efficient ones and contributing to the local community. The Chinese case studies reveal a strong institutional impact on firms' choice of business strategies and particularly the positioning strategy. The identified business strategies shed additional light on the effectiveness and implications of different policy instruments for energy efficiency.
•A case study framework is applied to explaining energy efficiency in Chinese firms.•Institutional constraints lead to two business strategies for energy efficiency.•Firms adopt energy-saving technologies to improve competitiveness incrementally.•Firms use more efficient plant and equipment substantially to expand or avert risk.•The cases reveal an adapted positioning strategy and additional policy implications.
Summary
Reuse via secondhand markets can extend the use phase of products, thereby reducing environmental impacts. Analyzing 500,000 listings of used Apple and Samsung smartphones sold in 2015 and ...2016 via eBay, we examine which product properties affect how long smartphones retain market value and facilitate market‐based reuse. Our results suggest that although repairability and large memory size are typically thought to be “life extending,” in practice they have limited impact on the current economic life span of smartphones and their market‐based reuse. In contrast, we show that brand, an intangible product property, can extend smartphones’ economic life span by 12.5 months. Because longer economic life spans imply extended use phases and longer life spans overall, these results illustrate the potential of harnessing the intangible properties of products to promote sustainable consumption.
Chertow M. R., Ashton W. S. and Espinosa J. C. Industrial symbiosis in Puerto Rico: environmentally related agglomeration economies, Regional Studies. Industrial symbiosis, a sub-field of industrial ...ecology, examines the flow of water, energy, materials, and by-products across firms in geographic proximity. Environmentally related co-location benefits often result that have not been a focus of traditional agglomeration economies, but extend the basic theory. This paper conceptualizes the relationship between agglomeration economies and industrial symbiosis, finding that many negative environmental externalities can be reduced while increasing production efficiency. Four industrial regions of Puerto Rico, all with agglomeration economies, but only two with significant industrial symbiosis, highlight the contribution of symbiosis and how it can influence both static and dynamic agglomeration economies.
Chertow M. R., Ashton W. S. et Espinosa J. C. Symbiose industrielle à Porto Rico: économie d'urbanisation liée à l'environnement, Regional Studies. La symbiose industrielle, sous domaine de l'écologie industrielle, examine les flux d'eau, d'énergie, de matériaux et de sous-produits entre entreprises voisines. Les avantages de la co-occupation présentent souvent des résultats qui n'ont pas été au cœur des économies d'urbanisation classiques mais qui prolongent cette théorie de base. Cet article conceptualise les relations entre les résultats de l'économie d'urbanisation et ceux de la symbiose industrielle selon lesquels de nombreux effets externes environnementaux négatifs peuvent être réduits tout en augmentant la productivité. Quatre régions industrielles de Porto Rico, toutes dans des économies d'urbanisation mais dont deux seulement avec une symbiose industrielle significative, mettent en lumière la contribution de la symbiose et comment elle peut avoir une influence sur des économies d'urbanisation statiques et dynamiques.
Écologie industrielle Symbiose industrielle Économie d'urbanisation Environnement Développement durable Porto Rico
Chertow M. R., Ashton W. S. und Espinosa J. C. Industriesymbiose in Puerto Rico: umweltbezogene Agglomerationswirtschaften, Regional Studies. Im Bereich der Industriesymbiose - einem Untergebiet der Industrieökologie - werden die Ströme von Wasser, Energie, Materialien und Nebenprodukten zwischen Firmen innerhalb eines geografischen Bereichs untersucht. Ein häufiges Resultat sind umweltbezogene gemeinsame Standortvorteile, die bisher nicht im Mittelpunkt der traditionellen Agglomerationswirtschaften standen, sondern die Grundtheorie erweitern. In diesem Beitrag wird die Beziehung zwischen Agglomerationswirtschaften und Industriesymbiose konzeptualisiert, wobei festgestellt wird, dass sich zahlreiche negative Umweltexternalitäten bei gleichzeitiger Erhöhung der Produktionseffizienz reduzieren lassen. Anhand von vier Industrieregionen in Puerto Rico - alle mit Agglomerationswirtschaften, aber nur zwei mit signifikanter Industriesymbiose - wird der Beitrag der Symbiose hervorgehoben, und es wird verdeutlicht, wie sich die Symbiose auf statische und dynamische Agglomerationswirtschaften auswirken kann.
Industrieökologie Industriesymbiose Agglomerationswirtschaften Umwelt Nachhaltige Entwicklung Puerto Rico
Chertow M. R., Ashton W. S. y Espinosa J. C. Simbiosis industrial en Puerto Rico: economías de aglomeración relacionadas con el medio ambiente, Regional Studies. En el ámbito de la simbiosis industrial - un subcampo de la ecología industrial - se examina el flujo del agua, la energía, los materiales y los subproductos en todas las empresas en proximidad geográfica. Los beneficios medioambientales de una ubicación común no han sido con frecuencia un enfoque de las economías de aglomeración tradicionales sino la ampliación de la teoría básica. En este artículo se visualiza la relación entre las economías de aglomeración y la simbiosis industrial, y se concluye que muchas externalidades medioambientales negativas pueden ser reducidas mientras que se aumenta la eficacia de la producción. Cuatro regiones industriales de Puerto Rico, todas con economías de aglomeración, pero sólo dos con simbiosis industriales significativas, recalcan la contribución de la simbiosis y cómo puede influenciar en las economías de aglomeración tanto estáticas como dinámicas.
Ecología industrial Simbiosis industrial Economías de aglomeración Medio ambiente Desarrollo sostenible Puerto Rico
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