Tools for promoting industrial symbiosis: A systematic review

Abstract

Industrial symbiosis (IS) employs a cross-organizational perspective to seek synergistic pairings of one company's waste output to another company's input, enabled by interfirm cooperation through resource and information sharing. Orchestrating IS relationships among companies, however, remains a complex process. In the literature, a wide range of qualitative and quantitative tools have emerged, tackling issues ranging from identifying IS creation opportunities to performance evaluation. Thus far, the available literature has focused on separate aspects and perspective of IS creation. Each individual work contributes, in part, to the overall process of IS creation. The disparate perspectives provided by the literature reflect the fragmented nature of available tools supporting IS, which operate in isolation of each other. An encompassing view of tools supporting the process of IS creation is missing to date. Therefore, to fill this gap, this study aims to develop a more comprehensive description of the landscape of IS tools by analyzing the associated approaches, roles, and contribution of existing tools. Through this understanding, the insights gained can be used to aid future development and advancement of tools for IS practitioners.