Material flow challenges in industrial ecosystems

Abstract

In Industrial Ecology the core idea is to find symbiotic relationships where waste material from one company is being used by other companies and industrial ecosystems are created. Although the idea is simple, fundamental challenges exist related to the quality of the material, stability of the system, etc. A core question is how to assess of the "goodness" of such a system. In this paper, it is shown how ecological input-output analysis metrics can be used to analyze flows.