Fostering Circular Economy Through the Analysis of Existing Open Access Industrial Symbiosis Databases

Abstract

Digital evolution underwent great progress in the late 20th century, democratizing the use of the Internet and, therefore, access to public sources of information. This technological shift caused great impacts on different fields, including Industrial Symbiosis (IS). IS stems from the concept of Circular Economy and requires well-structured information to encourage waste reuse. Under these premises, this investigation aimed at processing and analyzing existing open-access IS databases from several perspectives, including types of business areas, waste and new uses involved. In addition, existing IS data were explored with the support of different tools, such as correspondence, network and correlation analyses. The application of this methodology to a set of 496 shortlisted IS exchanges led to several findings, highlighting the strong relationship between metallurgy and the production of cement, the key role played by the electricity production sector both as a donor and a recipient, the versatility of the agriculture area due to their capacity for reusing a variety of waste as fertilizers and the importance of chemical products and steam and hot water as new uses. Overall, these results provide companies with efficient and understandable knowledge to donate or receive materials.

Recurring Patterns and Blueprints of Industrial Symbioses as Structural Units for an IT Tool

“…Based on the underlying dataset, this indicates that there are several (key) clusters and sectors in IS systems, which strongly function as key connections between different IS cluster networks. Together with Figure 3, it is shored up that predominantly the key sectors comprise: This results are close to congruent to the findings of [14]. As the network diagram in Figure 2 is very complex and hard to comprehend, detailed network diagrams of six exemplary key IS sector clusters were created to depict their in-depth relationships.…”

“…To date, many research studies were conducted to investigate various IS systems and to gain knowledge about IS opportunities and (initiation and operating) mechanisms, but as [13] pointed out, there are difficulties to extract and process useful information from the extensive available sources of data and knowledge. Especially companies still struggle to retrieve easy-to-understand information [14] and to integrate current IS knowledge into business processes [15]. All the mentioned observations have driven the current work, which aims to facilitate the technology-enabling environment for IS initiation, management and continuous improvement as a mean to exhaustively exploit IS potentials for leveraging sustainable industrial development and to provide easy-to-use business support to industrial actors and to increase user friendliness and IS adoption in industrial systems, because the barriers of inter alia lack of knowledge of IS possibilities, a lack of information sharing among companies are significantly lowered.…”

What Is in a Name? The Rising Star of the Circular Economy as a Resource-Related Concept for Sustainable Development

“…As mentioned, IS is a strategy for recovering unused resources for use by another entity. Although the concept of IS originated and developed within the field of IE, it has from the early CE literature been identified as essential element of the CE [75], which is now well recognised at international level [49,[76][77][78][79]. Indeed, IS provides the definition of what can be considered the meso-level perspective of circularity 1 .…”

AI and Data Democratisation for Intelligent Energy Management

“…Finally, much like energy, climate, and biophysical limits, big data and data democracy have also been studied and/or promoted as concepts in the context of transitioning from a linear to a circular economic model [78][79][80], where user-friendly data can provide insights for improving decision-making in terms of efficient resource use. Democratised AI tools can help predict trends of future supply and demand, weather fluctuations, demographics, biophysical limitations, as well as rates of reducing waste/externalities, reusing materials, and recycling products.…”