Circular economy for the process industry through industrial symbiosis (poster session)
Abstract
The circular economy provides a supply and demand balance considering planetary boundaries, and thus it drives industries and societies towards climate and resource neutrality. Fundamental to society, the process industry is vital to produce everyday products; they transform primary resources into raw materials for the manufacturing of virtually any product, from steel for construction and wind turbines to the chemicals used in clothes and food preservation. Building from the traditional waste hierarchy, the circular economy framework is tailored for the process industry to identify in a systematic way circular options within sectors but also to foster cross-sectorial collaboration, including communities. In this poster, industrial sectors are represented as an input-output model with a dual role, on the one hand as a source and on the other as a sink of resources. For each sector, four circular strategies are defined: reduce, reuse, recycle, and recover in nine clustering options (from renewable energy to heating networks) collected from the European sector roadmaps. This way, urban-industrial symbiosis drives circular economy strategies through cross-sectoral exchanges that help to close loops. The source-sink model enables the definition of cluster roadmaps for industrial sites and hubs for circularity and identifies the effort already made as well as ahead to transition into a fully circular economy.
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