Circular Economy Case Studies
The Kalundborg Industrial Symbiosis - a Circular Economy in action
A well-known ground-breaking example of this approach is the Kalundborg Eco-Industrial Park in Denmark. For the last 20 years, a group of industries, including a power company, a pharmaceutical plant, a wallboard producer, and an oil refinery, have shared and circulated resources. Excess heat is used by the community and other by-products not usable within the park are sold to companies in the vicinity. The close location to each of the industries is crucial in making this system work, as it becomes economically unfeasible to transport wastes over longer distances.
The Kalundborg park was not established simply to comply with environmental regulations. The park evolved almost spontaneously over a number of decades and now includes some 20 projects. This inter-company arrangement works for several reasons: cheaper materials and energy, minimization of disposal costs, income generated from production residue, and greater environmental responsibility. This combination of incentives shows how economic benefits and corporate environmental responsibility can go hand in hand.
According to the Kalundborg experience, there are several key factors in making this kind of eco-industrial park: (see http://www.symbiosis.dk/ for details)
-
The companies must fit each other
-
The companies must be located near each other
-
There must be openness between the companies
Eco-Industrial
Parks as an Implementation of the Circular Economy
(from A Generalized Framework
and Methodology for Product Planning in Eco-Industrial Parks)
An EIP can be considered to be an industrial system of planned materials and energy exchanges that seeks to minimize energy and raw materials use, minimize waste, and build sustainable economic, ecological and social relations. Two categories of EIP projects are identified: the redevelopment of existing industrial parks and the design of new EIPs.
By learning from the Nature, both types of EIPs try to form an engineered or self-organized industrial symbiosis system like Kalundborg (Denmark), the most famous park where a few disparate large units have worked out an effective system to optimize their materials and energy (Grann, 1997). Some common features of EIPs have been identified, for example,
-
industry match in terms of inputs and outputs,
-
high efficiency of material flows,
-
energy flows and information flows.
Towards a Larger Scale Circular Economy
It is a challenge to apply the principles which have been found to work in a local community of industries to a whole economy. Germany and Japan have been leaders in promoting this concept on a national scale. Germany passed the "Circular Flow Economy Waste Control Law" in 1994. (http://www.murl.nrw.de/sites/umweltrecht/e122.htm) This legislation made manufacturers responsible for the entire life-cycle of a product, from the moment its materials leave the ground to the time it is recycled, including energy used for transportation. Japan's efforts include its policy "Building a Socioeconomic System Fostering Environmentally Sound Material Cycle"(1996). (http://www.env.go.jp/en/pol/bplan/contents.html)
-
Recent conference papers on Eco-Industrial Parks in China (includes sample flow charts)
ŠNDRC 2000-2006