Material reutilization cycles across industries and production lines

The concept of Industrial Symbiosis aims at organizing industrial activity like a living ecosystem where the by-product outputs of one process are used as valuable raw material input for another process. A significant method for the systematic planning of Industrial Symbiosis is found in input–output matching, which is aimed at collecting material input and output data from companies, and using the results to establish links across industries. The collection and classification of data is crucial to the development of synergies in Industrial Symbiosis. Public and private institutions involved in the planning and development of Industrial Symbiosis rely however on manual interpretation of information in the course of creating synergies. Yet, the evaluation and analysis of these data sources on Industrial Symbiosis topics is a tall order. Within this chapter a method is presented which describes value creation activities according to the Value Creation Module (VCM). They are assessed before they are integrated in Value Creation Networks (VCNs), where alternative uses for by-products are proposed by means of iterative input-output matching of selected value creation factors

Analysing Port Community System Network Evolution

Ports have played an important role in facilitating exchanges among countries since the day when inland transportation was poor. As ports become hubs for global supply chain, they have to maintain their competitiveness not only by reassuring their efficiency, reliability, accessibility to hinterland, and sustainability. In addition, there is a constant challenge from all operational parties of the port to acquire needed information or to trust information received, due to multiple legacy systems and platforms that do not integrate with each other, and to the lack of real time updates. There are differing agendas between parties and, sometimes, distrust within the multi-stakeholder ecosystem leads to working in silos. This jeopardises seamless data exchange and cooperation across the port value chain, resulting in significant inefficiencies. Port community system (PCS) can enhance communication and simplify administrative process resulting economic and environmental benefit for actors in the supply chain. The invisibility of the benefit, actors’ heterogeneity and significant investment to develop the system resulting a reluctance in implementing PCS. This chapter aims to study the evolution mechanism behind the process of PCS network development using lessons learned from industrial symbiosis network development and network trajectories theory. The PCS network development follows a serendipitous and goal-oriented process that can be categorised into three stages: pre-PCS network, PCS network emergence, and PCS network expansion. This chapter contributes to the exploration of network evolution and documents lesson learned to foster PCS implementation.© 2020 Springer. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in European Port Cities in Transition: Moving Towards More Sustainable Sea Transport Hubs. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36464-9_10fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Establishing and testing the "reuse potential" indicator for managing wastes as resources

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. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.N

Tracking the diffusion of industrial symbiosis scholarship using bibliometrics: Comparing across Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar

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.N

Greening Industrial Production through Waste Recovery: “Comprehensive Utilization of Resources” in China

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_<i>X</i>, 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

Quantifying the system-wide recovery potential of waste in the global paper life cycle

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.Y

The hawaiian Islands: Conceptualizing an industrial ecology holarchic system

The Hawaiian Islands form a holarchic system with at least five nested layers (holons) at increasing spatial scales: from a single enterprise to cities, to individual islands, to the archipelago (the group of islands), and to the global resource base that connects them all. Each holonic layer operates individually but is also linked to holons at lower and higher levels by material input and output flows. An integrated study of the holarchic system allows us to explore the value of applying this concept to industrial ecology. We present examples from a multi-level material flow analysis combining a large quantity of material and energy flow data for Hawaii from the five holarchic levels. Our analysis demonstrates how a holarchic approach to the study of selected interacting systems can reveal features and linkages of their metabolism not otherwise apparent and can provide a novel basis for discovering material, energy, and societal connections.Y

The Hawaiian Islands: Conceptualizing an Industrial Ecology Holarchic System

The Hawaiian Islands form a holarchic system with at least five nested layers (holons) at increasing spatial scales: from a single enterprise to cities, to individual islands, to the archipelago (the group of islands), and to the global resource base that connects them all. Each holonic layer operates individually but is also linked to holons at lower and higher levels by material input and output flows. An integrated study of the holarchic system allows us to explore the value of applying this concept to industrial ecology. We present examples from a multi-level material flow analysis combining a large quantity of material and energy flow data for Hawaii from the five holarchic levels. Our analysis demonstrates how a holarchic approach to the study of selected interacting systems can reveal features and linkages of their metabolism not otherwise apparent and can provide a novel basis for discovering material, energy, and societal connections