8^th Annual Industrial Symbiosis Research Symposium

Reassessing the Basics of Industrial Symbiosis

San Francisco, CA – June 5-6, 2011

The Bentley Reserve, 301 Battery Street, San Francisco Financial District

The premise of the 8^th Annual Industrial Symbiosis Research Symposium is that many years of development have occurred around the concept of industrial symbiosis, since our first meetings. In earlier times, the most important issue was to demonstrate the concept and practice of industrial symbiosis. With increasing experience, it is time to generalize among industrial symbiosis projects to be able to compare across them as a means of advancing our common knowledge as a research community. This year the Symposium will undertake the difficult task of finding consensus around key questions and definitions of industrial symbiosis.

The proposed questions are:

1. Definition: What is included in industrial symbiosis? What is excluded? Are different research teams defining IS differently either implicitly or explicitly?
2. What constitutes a by-product exchange or synergy?  How can we categorize exchanges?  Which are “internal” to the system under study and which are “external?”  How do we create common counting systems – do we count materials, partners, exchanges?
3. How should benefits be quantified?  Economic, environmental, social? What measurement methodologies are being used? What framework would capture the complexity and differences across the various examples of symbiosis?
4. What are principal “business” models of successful industrial symbiosis? NISP, TEDA, zero-waste businesses, etc.  Should we reconsider a typology of IS projects/parks/clusters/networks?