Industrial Symbiosis (IS) around the world in the last 20 years had been characterized through an extensive analysis of scientific papers on the IS emerging process, with a special focus on its early stages. The literature suggests that in this process there are key factors (enablers, barriers, triggers, and challenges) that play a critical role in Industrial Symbiosis. From those factors, the enablers and barriers have been highlighted in most of the studies in their different dimensions (social, economic, policy, technological, management, or geographical, amongst others). Several implementation cases suggest that the relevance of these factors rely on the dominant economic sectors involved. This study aims to reveal the key enablers and barriers in various economic sectors and its behaviour according to each one. To accomplish this objective, a comprehensive assessment methodology was designed and performed. This methodology is divided in two sequential phases: the first, sectoral analysis, focuses on the identification of the more relevant dimensions per economic sectors; in the second phase, incidence analysis, the individual behaviour of the enablers and barriers per economic sector are identified. This new approach correlates the economic sectors and factors incidence in order to provide new insights on the key barriers, and enablers on different dimensions. The main result of this study consists in the identification of a set of recommendations that might be critical to reinforce the emerging synergies process and to help overcome the barriers in each economic sector analysed.

Industrial symbiosis (IS) is a business model that proposes symbiotic exchanges, allowing the flow of resources, wastes, and utilities between companies. In recent years, IS initiatives have been exponentially growing around the world. This can be attributed to the increasing awareness on the possibility of obtaining economic, environmental, and social benefits through the implementation of this model. Despite the exponential growth of IS initiatives, the companies are still facing problems in the achievement of reliable and permanent synergies. Over the years the literature has identified several factors in the IS emerging process. Incentives are among these factors, being defined as unlocking tools or mechanisms related to diverse dimensions such as economic, political, social, intermediaries, process, and technology. Authors believe that the large-scale implementation of IS incentives has not been properly addressed. In order to promote facilitated IS implementation and achieve a replicator effect, incentives should be fully addressed. In many case studies, it has been observed that the incentives for IS can be threatened by risks, compromising the implementation, and hindering the emerging process. This study developed a dedicated framework that is composed of incentive identification from best practices of IS and expert consultation; a risk assessment model based on risk factors identification and clustering; and finally, the mitigation actions based on the assessment outputs. The main result of this study is one set of mitigations actions that correlate the implementation levels (clusters) and the potential stakeholders involved.

A successful and broad implementation of industrial symbiosis (IS) initiatives is highly related to stakeholder’s involvement and technical considerations on its process’ development. This paper presents a mixed research study (quantitative and qualitative) focusing on the development of a dedicated tool based on sequential modules’ that support companies in the assessment of their potential to develop and implement IS scenarios. The first module considers the identification and characterization of the economic activity of the company to support an IS contextualization analysis. The second module provides the evaluation of the company’s current state, allowing key intervention areas to be defined. The third module focuses on the assessment of the potential scenarios for synergies implementation based on an economic benefit comparison of different valorization scenarios regarding the available surplus or waste. Complementarily, a SWOT analysis for the identification of the internal strengths and weaknesses, the external opportunities and threats associated with the IS process implementation is presented. The final output compiles qualitative and quantitative results regarding each module. The presented tool is currently under validation at industrial case studies. The preliminary results show the high applicability of the proposed tool in order to support decision making processes on surpluses valorization scenarios selection.

To foster the implementation of Industrial Symbiosis, several support tools have been developed to facilitate the dissemination of Industrial Symbiosis (IS) and the engagement of stakeholders; the establishment of exchanges between companies, the so-called synergies; and the assessment of impacts and benefits. Despite this, it has been found that stakeholders still do not have a clear envisioning of the required steps to the technical implementation of synergies and there are no facilitating tools, such as methodologies, frameworks, modelling tools, and databases, among others, that aid to technically support decision-making of synergy implementation. Thus, the goal of this paper is to present a dedicated framework that provides a set of guidelines and defines a technical viability analysis to support the implementation of potential synergies, which can be used and replicated by any IS practitioner. It comprehends a methodological approach to assess the compliance of a given synergy opportunity; its characterization concerning the definition of the necessary intermediary steps for the technical implementation; and an assessment of the technical feasibility of the synergy. The implementation of the framework allowed the successful technical validation of the studied synergy opportunities, providing a final technical viability assessment that can support decision-making of technology selection and synergy implementation.

The increase of industrial symbiosis (IS) activities around the world has strongly contributed to promote awareness among companies on the benefits of this business model and, consequently, their interest to apply/incorporate dedicated IS actions in their activities. In most cases, companies assume self-learning and ongoing approaches for the adaption of synergies, ignoring some fundamental aspects as the full spectrum of considerations regarding these processes. Unexpected barriers frequently appear during the implementation process and become hardly overcome due to incomplete systematic approaches and the lack of information. In this context, it is important to promote effective and sequential guidance procedures regarding IS implementation processes to support companies in their transition to full IS processes implementation. This paper aims to advance the synergy implementation emerging process, through the identification, promotion, and definition of the core steps to be considered in an IS implementation process. This study is based on a comprehensive perspective for the definition of contents to be considered in a step-by-step guideline that includes the different theoretical, technical, and strategic approaches for large-scale IS promotion. The main outputs of this paper are a final set of independent and sequential information clusters, their associated contents identification process, and a comprehensive description of the systematic approach used to support companies in the implementation of their pre-identified stages. The guideline methodology proposed in this study is an important support tool for companies, practitioners, and agents intending to initiate IS synergies implementation and also a strong contribution to the development of complementary guidance activities regarding IS implementation process.