Who gets the benefits? An approach for assessing the environmental performance of industrial symbiosis

Industrial symbiosis networks are generally assumed to provide economic and environmental benefits for all firms involved, though few quantifications have been produced in the literature, and the methods for these quantifications have varied. This paper provides an approach to quantify the environmental performance of industrial symbiosis networks using guidance from the literature of life cycle assessment. Additionally, an approach to distribute credits due to exchanges for firms in the industrial symbiosis network is outlined. From the approach, influential methodological considerations used for the quantifications are discussed, including e.g. the production of reference systems, allocation methods, system boundaries and functional unit. The implications of such an approach may be beneficial for the industrial symbiosis community and provide information crucial for taxes, subsidies, business relations, expansion possibilities for the network, marketing and other issues related to the environmental performance of firms in the industrial symbiosis network.