Industrial Symbiosis: A Sectoral Analysis on Enablers and Barriers

Industrial Symbiosis (IS) around the world in the last 20 years had been characterized
through an extensive analysis of scientific papers on the IS emerging process, with a special focus on
its early stages. The literature suggests that in this process there are key factors (enablers, barriers,
triggers, and challenges) that play a critical role in Industrial Symbiosis. From those factors, the
enablers and barriers have been highlighted in most of the studies in their different dimensions
(social, economic, policy, technological, management, or geographical, amongst others). Several
implementation cases suggest that the relevance of these factors rely on the dominant economic
sectors involved. This study aims to reveal the key enablers and barriers in various economic sectors
and its behaviour according to each one. To accomplish this objective, a comprehensive assessment
methodology was designed and performed. This methodology is divided in two sequential phases:
the first, sectoral analysis, focuses on the identification of the more relevant dimensions per economic
sectors; in the second phase, incidence analysis, the individual behaviour of the enablers and barriers
per economic sector are identified. This new approach correlates the economic sectors and factors
incidence in order to provide new insights on the key barriers, and enablers on different dimensions.
The main result of this study consists in the identification of a set of recommendations that might
be critical to reinforce the emerging synergies process and to help overcome the barriers in each
economic sector analysed.