Industrial Ecology and Industry Symbiosis for Environmental Sustainability by Xiaohong Li

Author:Xiaohong Li
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

4.2 Regional Community-based Industrial Symbiosis Development - Kalundborg in Denmark

IS collaborations, characterised by novel sourcing of required inputs and value-added destinations for non-product outputs, have gradually progressed in Kalundborg , Denmark over the past forty-five years (Valentine 2016). The first collaboration took place between an oil refinery and a wallboard manufacturer in 1972 (Valentine 2016). The initiation was generated from social interactions that took place amongst Rotary Club members, a group of executives of local firms in Kalundborg discussing and sharing their key business challenges (Valentine 2016). It was long before the terminologies of IS, industrial ecosystem and IE were proposed over the period from 1989 to 1992 (Frosch and Gallopoulos 1989; Tibbs 1992). Unwanted natural gas, a by-product from the oil refinery process was transferred through a constructed pipeline to the wallboard manufacturer to be used to dry gypsum boards. It was a collaboration of creating ‘a novel sourcing of required inputs and value-added destinations for non-product outputs’ for the two companies involved while turning a by-product into an energy resource. Therefore, this collaboration is a symbiotic collaboration . Over four decades, more than 20 enterprises have been engaged in more than 30 symbiotic exchanges in the Kalundborg IS community (Branson 2016; Valentine 2016). This has been coupled with improved business and technical processes and business environmental culture in Kalundborg (Valentine 2016).

The IS community in Kalundborg has developed by involving the following types of companies across different industries: a coal-fired power plant, an oil refinery, a pharmaceutical plant, a wallboard manufacturer, a cement construction material manufacturer, a soil remediation company, pig farms, fish farms, local farms and others (Branson 2016; Ehrenfeld and Gertler 1997; Jacobsen 2006; Valentine 2016). It also includes neighbourhood residential households that receive waste heat as energy sources through the Kalundborg utility company (Ehrenfeld and Gertler 1997). The coal-fired power station alone has more than 10 symbiotic relationships with other local companies in Kalundborg, but many are energy and water-related exchanges. Besides the main production output of electricity, the coal-fired power station also generates waste heat, steam and other solid wastes, such as fly ash and sludge. The knowledge is critical and powerful to IS development, as well as opportunities to develop trust for collaboration. Knowing that fly ash can be used as a raw material for producing cement, scrubber sludge as fertiliser for farming, and gypsum in sludge for manufacturing plasterboards, made each initialisation of these IS relationships possible in the first place in Kalundborg. Table 4.1 presents some typical novel symbiosis exchanges within Kalundborg (Branson 2016; Ehrenfeld and Gertler 1997; Jacobsen 2006; Valentine 2016). The ideas of these novel exchanges can be fostered in similar types of companies in different locations worldwide, or help generate businesses initiatives.Table 4.1Typical novel exchanges of symbiotic collaborations within Kalundborg

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