Initiating a waste management and resource recovery network: a college, NGO, and corporate partnership

The increasing awareness of sustainable development concept and its economic benefits are making environmentally proactive companies to consider how they can achieve eco-efficiency improvement through material exchange and by partnering with academic, governmental and non-governmental agencies. This paper reports the experiences and achievements of a tripartite partnership initiated by the author with a number of companies in Calgary and a Calgarian NGO. The network is a form of eco-industrial network that is being developed to benefit the participating companies and to develop industrial ecology students' skill in eco-industrial network modeling. The paper highlights the initial difficulties, how they were overcome and a conceptual model developed for assessing the sustainability of the material exchange loop. The preliminary results obtained revealed that the companies are enthusiastic in taking part if it will help them achieve waste management cost reduction, improvement in their corporate environmental performance and corporate goodwill, and protection of their proprietary information. It also reveals that such corporate exposure to students develop their skills in balancing their academic view with what works in the corporate world.