Abstract
Increasing global resource consumption puts the availability of natural mineral resources under significant pressure. One strategy to overcome this trend is the decoupling of economic growth and resource consumption and the application of circular economy approaches. These approaches aim at closing material cycles across sectoral boundaries. Beside these attempts, there are further options for action aimed at minimization of resource consumption through resource sharing approaches. This study investigates resource-saving potentials on different scales namely on a personal scale through sharing goods and services, but also in the frame of industrial symbiosis through sharing of secondary resources at a company scale. The environmental effects have been quantified using life cycle assessment examples for these two simulated cases. The results show for both resource consumption levels, resource savings potentials of up to 2 powers of ten, that can particularly be proven regarding the impact category ‘fossil resource depletion’. The emergence of industrial symbiosis can be identified by six factors: Resource, government, economy, company, technology, and society. The cases simulated in the study are supported by empirical evidence from real-life examples, which consider the mentioned factors.
Highlights
The relationship between global resource consumption and economic growth has been controversially discussed in economic terms and reveals itself, for example, in the formulation of different economic disciplines and positions
There is the concept of green growth, which negates the inextricably positive causal relationship between economic performance and resource consumption and even assumes that green growth can contribute to the realization of a negative correlation between the two variables [10]
Industrial symbiosis is a concept within industrial ecology, focusing on enlarging sustainability in the economy, which became popular in the last decade
Summary
The relationship between global resource consumption and economic growth has been controversially discussed in economic terms and reveals itself, for example, in the formulation of different economic disciplines and positions. Some scientists are of the view that resource consumption and economic growth cannot be decoupled from one another and systemic change is required to achieve long-term environmental goals (e.g., [1,2]). Georgescu-Roegen [9] justified the impossibility of decoupling economic growth and resource consumption by stating that the production of goods and services requires the use of energy. Two case studies were investigated to quantify resource savings through resource sharing approaches by: (a) common use of goods in a local goods sharing network, and (b) resource efficiency through the common use of resources and secondary resources through industrial symbiosis of innovative industries, insect farming for human food production. The study has been structured in a comprehensive literature review, providing the basics for the economic understanding of the resource sharing subject, followed by the description of the materials and methods, the presentation of the results of the assessment of the case studies, followed by the discussion and conclusions on the applicability of resource-sharing approaches
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