Some development opportunities require delivery at cost, and to enable this to happen we established Industrial Symbiosis Limited, an independent not-for-profit company, that provides an opportunity to continue sharing our expertise around the world on projects without profit.
Partnering to help strengthen our global impact
We invest our resources in this way to continue to advance industrial symbiosis as the circular economy in action.
Industrial Symbiosis Limited projects have included the below.
Transitional Regions towards Industrial Symbiosis (TRIS)
The project
The ‘transitional regions toward industrial symbiosis’ (TRIS) completed in March 2021 enabled a systemic uptake of industrial symbiosis in 5 European regions, supporting policy makers to increase the competitiveness of their SMEs by introducing industrial symbiosis practices.
Our role
Industrial Symbiosis Ltd played both an advisory and dissemination role. The consortium exhibited a diverse interregional cooperation in terms of geography, productive system and maturity of industrial symbiosis practices: the partner included the city of Birmingham (project leader) and regions of Hungary, Italy, Sweden and Spain.
Switch Africa Green: Enhancing resource productivity and environmental performance of MSMEs in 6 African countries through the concept of industrial symbiosis
The European Union (EU) funded a pilot project implementing industrial symbiosis as an innovative approach to waste management in Africa. The African Roundtable on Sustainable Consumption and Production (ARSCP) administered the project with its partners in six countries:
- The South African National Cleaner Production Centre,
- National Cleaner Production Centre of Ghana,
- The Kenya National Cleaner Production Centre,
- Uganda National Cleaner Production Centre,
- Solid Waste Management Division, Mauritius Ministry of Environment,
- Sustainable Development and Disaster and Beach Management, and
- The Women Environmental Programme, Burkina Faso.
The project is implemented under the overall management of United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
Our role
Industrial Symbiosis Ltd. was responsible for providing technical support. We organised Training of Trainers (TOT) workshops for institutions taking part in industrial symbiosis as a modern resource efficiency concept based on the economies of wastes. From January 2016 to June 2018, some 600 enterprises in six African countries were trained in cleaner production and industrial symbiosis to identify opportunities for beneficial reuse of under-utilised resources. MSMEs learned how to track materials in process, identify, quantify and analyse materials inputs and outputs in their business systems enabling reusing and reduction of the amount of virgin materials.
The project was timely for Africa which faced the highest rates of growth of population, industrialisation and urbanisation in the world, but lacked satisfactory mechanisms for managing their adverse impacts, including waste management.