Rethinking Resilience in Industrial Symbiosis: Conceptualization and Measurements

- New conceptualization of resilience in industrial symbiosis is proposed.
- An innovative method of measuring resilience in industrial symbiosis is designed.
- Two real case studies are discussed to test the resilience index designed.
- Our resilience index is useful to build highly resilient symbiotic networks.

Resilience has become the new imperative of industrial symbiosis research, since its recognition as a fundamental factor in the development of sustainable Industrial Symbiosis Networks (ISNs). We offer a contribution to this topic by providing a wider conceptualization of resilience and an innovative method of measuring it, borrowing from studies in other disciplines such as ecology, complexity science, and engineering. We focus on two important antecedents of ISN resilience, i.e., diversity at system and firm level and the ubiquity of wastes, on the basis of which we design a new method of measuring ISN resilience. This captures the extent to which the removal of a firm is critical for the ISN's survival. We test our resilience index on two real ISNs and compare it against other network-based measurement methods commonly adopted in the literature. Finally, we discuss the advantages of the new measurement procedure.