Development of an interactive industrial symbiosis query system with structured industrial waste database in Taiwan

Abstract

Industrial symbiosis (IS) has contributed significant environmental and economic benefits in many industrial parks or regions, with inter-firm trade of wastes or by-products for reuse. To facilitate IS in more regions, information systems and tools could help identify the opportunities for more companies to mimic the successful cases of by-product synergies. A review of existing IS information systems showed that most lack sufficient quality data, are not operational, or are not publicly accessible. In addition, studies on the development of IS information systems have only limited descriptions of the programming approaches used to create the tools for matching companies and illustrating complicated network by-product synergies based on IS data. Based on Taiwan’s waste data, this work presents a well-established IS information system with three applications designed for target users, including the companies involved in IS, the facilitators seeking to grow IS in industrial parks or regions, and waste management authorities. This web-based system was based on massive amounts of detailed industrial by-product input and output datasets. In the by-products’ records of more than one metric ton per year, there are 1833 patterns of different by-products reused by various industries. A comparison with other IS information systems and data repositories shows the advantage of using a government-owned industrial waste database with detailed waste classification in identifying massive by-product synergies. Novel data visualization technologies are employed to interactively generate diagrams or networks in response to the user selection of by-products or industries of interest. A demonstration of the query on the sugar manufacturers using sugar cane presents ten by-products and potentially 222 reuses by different industries.