Industrial Symbiosis Recommender Systems

For a long time, humanity has lived upon the paradigm that the amounts of natural resources are unlimited and that the environment has ample regenerative capacity. However, the notion to shift towards sustainability has resulted in a worldwide adoption of policies addressing resource efficiency and preservation of natural resources.One of the key environmental and economic sustainable operations that is currently promoted and enacted in the European Union policy is Industrial Symbiosis. In industrial symbiosis, firms aim to reduce the total material and energy footprint by circulating traditional secondary production process outputs of firms to become part of an input for the production process of other firms.This thesis directs attention to the design considerations for recommender systems in the highly dynamic domain of industrial symbiosis. Recommender systems are a promising technology that may facilitate in multiple facets of the industrial symbiosis creation as they reduce the complexity of decision making. This typical strength of recommender systems has been responsible for improved sales and a higher return of investments. That provides the prospect for industrial symbiosis recommenders to increase the number of synergistic transactions that reduce the total environmental impact of the process industry in particular

Zijm Consortium: Engineering a Sustainable Supply Chain System

In this paper we address one of the current major research areas of the Zijm consortium; engineering sustainable supply chain systems by transforming traditionally linear practices to circular systems. We illustrate this field of research with a case consisting of a network of three firms Willem (W), Hendrik (H), and Maria (M)} and show how the practice of application-oriented state of the art technology transformed their linear relation to the circular Zijm consortium. The work shows that through inspiration and knowledge transfer in the versatile picturesque Twente Region, a group of future generation researchers are shaped