Industrial Symbiosis: A Review on Uncovering Approaches, Opportunities, Barriers and Policies

The industrial symbiosis (IS) has been becoming increasingly popular from last decade of last century because of its prospect towards safeguarding environment and reducing usage of virgin materials through recycling. After emergence of symbiotic network, industrial clusters followed different approaches and faced different difficulties at their uncovering stages. Some successful symbiotic network showed great promise in reducing usage of raw materials. Policy regarding IS has a tremendous impact on the genesis, emergence, and development of it. In this study authors tried to review already followed approaches, benefit obtained and problem faced by the industrial owner along with generalized policy framework they needed at the very early stages of IS network. However, two approaches are followed by industries – planned approach and spontaneous approach though there are factors that helped to initiate symbiotic network. Obtained benefits from IS network can be classified into three categories and these are-environmental benefit, social benefit and economic benefit. On the contrary industrial networks also faced some barriers i.e. technological barrier, economic barrier, informational barrier, organizational barrier, regulatory barrier, uncertainty and risk of initiating IS network. Thus policies were formulated to ensure sustainability of projects and to overcome barrier. Policy initiatives helps to bring the cooperatives under same industrial symbiotic network, shape a symbiotic network and patronize the symbiotic networks by providing incentives. Industrial networks only sustains when all favorable conditions are easily available to those otherwise many prospective networks will fail to see the light of success.