Industrial Symbiosis: A Sectoral Analysis on Enablers and Barriers

Abstract

Industrial Symbiosis (IS) around the world in the last 20 years had been characterized through an extensive analysis of scientific papers on the IS emerging process, with a special focus on its early stages. The literature suggests that in this process there are key factors (enablers, barriers, triggers, and challenges) that play a critical role in Industrial Symbiosis. From those factors, the enablers and barriers have been highlighted in most of the studies in their different dimensions (social, economic, policy, technological, management, or geographical, amongst others). Several implementation cases suggest that the relevance of these factors rely on the dominant economic sectors involved. This study aims to reveal the key enablers and barriers in various economic sectors and its behaviour according to each one. To accomplish this objective, a comprehensive assessment methodology was designed and performed. This methodology is divided in two sequential phases: the first, sectoral analysis, focuses on the identification of the more relevant dimensions per economic sectors; in the second phase, incidence analysis, the individual behaviour of the enablers and barriers per economic sector are identified. This new approach correlates the economic sectors and factors incidence in order to provide new insights on the key barriers, and enablers on different dimensions. The main result of this study consists in the identification of a set of recommendations that might be critical to reinforce the emerging synergies process and to help overcome the barriers in each economic sector analysed.