page_title: Industrial symbiosis
hierarchical_section_title: Industrial symbiosis
caption_attribution_description: English: Example of Industrial Symbiosis where waste heat in the form of steam is sent via pipeline to an ethanol plant that uses the heat as part of its production process.
context_page_description: Industrial symbiosis a subset of industrial ecology. It describes how a network of diverse organizations can foster eco-innovation and long-term culture change, create and share mutually profitable transactions—and improve business and technical processes.
  Although geographic proximity is often associated with industrial symbiosis, it is neither necessary nor sufficient—nor is a singular focus on physical resource exchange. Strategic planning is required to optimize the synergies of co-location. In practice, using industrial symbiosis as an approach to commercial operations—using, recovering and redirecting resources for reuse—results in resources remaining in productive use in the economy for longer. This in turn creates business opportunities, reduces demands on the earth's resources, and provides a stepping-stone towards creating a circular economy. The industrial symbiosis model devised and managed by International Synergies Limited is a facilitated model operating at the national scale in the United Kingdom, and at other scales around the world.
context_section_description: Industrial symbiosis a subset of industrial ecology. It describes how a network of diverse organizations can foster eco-innovation and long-term culture change, create and share mutually profitable transactions—and improve business and technical processes.
  Although geographic proximity is often associated with industrial symbiosis, it is neither necessary nor sufficient—nor is a singular focus on physical resource exchange. Strategic planning is required to optimize the synergies of co-location. In practice, using industrial symbiosis as an approach to commercial operations—using, recovering and redirecting resources for reuse—results in resources remaining in productive use in the economy for longer. This in turn creates business opportunities, reduces demands on the earth's resources, and provides a stepping-stone towards creating a circular economy  .  The industrial symbiosis model devised and managed by International Synergies Limited is a facilitated model operating at the national scale in the United Kingdom (NISP—National Industrial Symbiosis Programme), and at other scales around the world. International Synergies Limited has developed global expertise in IS, instigating programmes in Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, South Africa and Turkey, as well as the UK. Industrial symbiosis is a subset of industrial ecology, with a particular focus on material and energy exchange. Industrial ecology is a relatively new field that is based on a natural paradigm, claiming that an industrial ecosystem may behave in a similar way to the natural ecosystem wherein everything gets recycled, albeit the simplicity and applicability of this paradigm has been questioned.
caption: Example of Industrial symbiosis: waste steam from a waste incinerator (right) is piped to an ethanol plant (left) where it is used as an input to their production process
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