Improving enterprise competitive advantage with industrial symbiosis: case study of a smeltery in China

Industrial symbiosis, a subfield of industrial ecology, focuses on transforming the waste of one firm into the valuable input of another, which improves the competitive advantages of supply chain by reducing production cost and improving environmental performance. Considering the specific situation where there are so many state-owned big company groups in China, this paper utilizes the ideas of constructing an industrial symbiosis among different firms, and does a case study on applying the concept into the inner relationships' reconstruction among different production systems in a big state-owned smeltery in South-west China. Three kinds of approaches are explored: 1) recycling and reusing the release; 2) concentrating and abstracting metals from the residues; 3) extending the product chain for value-added products. The results show that it can effectively improve the competitive advantage of the enterprise in terms of decreasing production cost and improving environmental performance.