This paper reports the activity, promoted by the Italian agency for new technologies, energy and sustainable economic development (ENEA), in the framework of the project for the development and implementation of the first Italian Platform for Industrial Symbiosis implemented in Sicily (2011Sicily ( -2015. The goals of the project were: to provide a methodology and an instrument for industrial symbiosis implementation at regional scale, to implement a IS Platform as a support to SMEs to individuate symbiosis opportunities in the region. The whole approach includes: network activation, platform architecture design and implementation, analysis of the productive sector in Sicily, data collection and companies involvement. In particular the paper focuses on the activities developed for companies' network creation trough a preliminary analysis of the predominant productive sectors followed by the organization of operative meetings in Sicily for companies' involvement, analysis of potential synergies and resources sharing, and finally platform population. During the first two meetings more than 80 SME were linked giving rise to almost 400 output resources and almost 180 input resources. More than 690 potential matches were found between the participating enterprises showing interesting opportunities both for substituting resources with waste products in real and virtual cases and for sharing waste management services and infrastructures. The discussion occurred during the meeting has remarked the significance and the consequences of the regulatory and control system on IS application, underlining the necessary participation of local stakeholders and control authorities. It has also emerged the need to identify predominant productive activities in well-defined territorial contexts where to investigate the specific/local tangles taking into account legislative and technical-economic feasibility. Technical dossiers on three main resource streams (wastes from processing stone materials; plastics and agro-industrial wastes), which may generate the more interesting potential synergies, are being processed. These dossiers include European, Italian and regional regulations, guidelines, technical standards, logistic and economical aspects useful for supporting companies in synergies implementation. Results of this activity will also be used to improve the algorithm in the platform to find synergies.

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The Project "Green-Industrial Symbiosis" (G-IS), in Emilia Romagna region (IT), took place in two phases: phase I, 05.2013-03.2014; phase II, 10. 2014-10.2015. During the first phase, it was completed the first part of the pilot project of industrial symbiosis (IS) in Emilia-Romagna, which involved 13 companies in the agro-industrial sector, 7 laboratories of the High Technology Network, with Unioncamere and Aster (promoters) and ENEA (technical and scientific coordinator). The first phase generated 90 potential synergies among the 10 companies that shared their input-output resources. During the second phase, promoted by ASTER and organized with the technical and scientific coordination of ENEA, some of the most interesting synergies of the first phase were selected, in order to go from the identification of potential synergies to its actual implementation. In particular, 3 pathways of industrial symbiosis were chosen, in which waste food industry outputs were destined to three different types of exploitation (production of biopolymers, nutraceuticals, energy recovery). The pathway that a resource must take to shift from being a company's output to another company's input, involves several steps that require compliance and verification of regulatory, technical, logistical and economic issues. All these factors have been examined and reported in 3 Operative Manuals for the companies involved, each one arranged for a different symbiosis' pathway. The manuals consist of two sections: an operative and a documental part (technical dossier). The operative part describes the transformation path of resources, with a layout in which each block and intermediate vector represent a passage of the resource (e.g. exit from the producing company, transport, valorisation). Under the layout, a synthesis table refers, for each stage, to the necessary requirements, reported in full in the technical dossier. Links on the synthesis table refer, for example, to laws or techniques that the specific flow, in each step, must comply with. These links also define, with a predefined color, if that aspect can be considered as an obstacle to the progress of the symbiosis.