Abstract
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.
Highlights
Industrial symbiosis (IS) is a sub-field of industrial ecology (IE) that started to appear in the early 1970s [1]
This paper aims to advance the synergy implementation process, through the identification of the core intervention areas/stages to be considered in a guideline for IS by promoting the principles that should guide the companies in all the stages of the IS emerging process, defining target scenarios of potential large-scale implementation and supporting them by the identification of a multilevel set of recommendations
Each one of them corresponding to a specific stage of the IS process in a practical implementation perspective being organized sequentially to provide a clear step by step methodology approach for practitioners
Summary
Industrial symbiosis (IS) is a sub-field of industrial ecology (IE) that started to appear in the early 1970s [1] In practical terms, this circular business model aims to redirect wastes and raw materials from a certain process to be used in another process [2]. It is necessary to identify the actions required to overcome the different levels of barriers and promote IS practical implementation in a structured and simplified manner For this reason, the scientific community has developed practical studies on the IS approaches validation [3, 11, 21] , analysis and characterization of case studies [22,23,24], and promotion of facilitating frameworks at several levels [9, 25, 26]. As an answer for this, the concept of guidelines appears, defined as the information that intends to advise people on how something should be done or what something should be [29] to support potential users in the understanding and application of actions at the different stages of an implementation process
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