Industrial symbiosis: Good for economy, good for environment
How will industries break decades-long practice of waste-dumping when the economy encourages it?
As concerns about natural resource depletion and pollution buildup continue to grow, the need to transition our economies into a circular framework has become alarmingly pressing. As far back as the Industrial Revolution, national economic models have been overwhelmingly, if not entirely linear: the process of extracting raw materials to manufacture products to sell to people before they are ultimately disposed of.
According to a 2019 OECD Environmental Performance Review, the global demand for natural resources and materials has grown at an astonishing rate. From 1970 to 2017, the use of raw materials more than tripled from 27 billion metric tons to 89 billion metric tons, putting it on track to reach 167 billion tons by 2060. As a result of current linear economic models and industrial processes, a significant portion of these resources will ultimately be wasted.
This has particularly been the case for electronic products due to the marketing of persistent upgrades, which prompts people to get rid of the older products they perceive as obsolete, without considering the hazardous substances and valuable metals inside them. In fact, this is the most rapidly growing waste stream in the 21st century, clocking in at an annual rate of 20-50 million metric tons. Due to this accumulation of e-waste, electronic products have infamously earned them the moniker, “designed for the dump.”
E-waste aside, however, this basic process is abundant in the vast majority of industries and factories around the world, regardless of the types of products they produce. At the end of the manufacturing process, industries are often left with a heaping amount of waste material for which they no longer have any use.
Industries are in business of making money, and that means saving money anywhere they can. What’s the most cost-effective method for waste disposal? Landfills. Why spend more time, effort and money to search for an alternative to your unwanted waste when you can quickly pay a small fee to quickly dump it in a regulated landfill?
Not only does this widely conventional practice give rise to a slew of environmental problems, it also creates untapped economic opportunities. For these reasons, Israel’s Economy and Environmental Protection ministries initiated the Industrial Symbiosis Project. The government-funded project was developed to link together the resource inputs and waste streams of thousands of factories and other facilities in order to monetize waste management while limiting environmental damage from excessive landfilling.
As opposed to municipal solid waste (MSW), which originates from households and the public sector, industrial waste stems from manufacturing and industrial processes. And because the industrial sector is so diverse, so are the waste streams. These include dirt, gravel, masonry, concrete, scrap metals, glass, plastics, gypsum, oil, solvents, chemicals, organic matter, scrap lumber, and much more, depending on a factory’s process.
How much industrial waste is being generated
to warrant such a shift from the linear economic model? It’s hard to say, given the overwhelming attention that worldwide MSW generation has received, which experts predict will increase by 70% to reach a total of 3.4 billion metric tons per year by 2050.
However, MSW is dwarfed by industrial waste. In the United States, industrial and hazardous waste grew from an estimated 4.5 million tons per year after WWII to 57 million tons by 1975, and to 265 million tons by 1990. According to the EPA’s Guide for Industrial Waste Management, a shocking 7.6 billion tons of industrial solid waste are now being generated and disposed of each year across American facilities alone.
ISRAEL’S INDUSTRIAL sector generates much less waste than the US; no surprise given that Israel is less than 0.3% the size of the United States. While Israel’s Environmental Protection Ministry does not specify industrial waste specifically, it does acknowledge that as of 2019, six million tons of waste debris from the construction sector was being produced every year. That’s in addition to the annual 5.3 million tons of municipal and commercial waste. According to an OECD Indicator report from 2013, Israel was producing 303,000 metric tons of hazardous waste every year.
For the sake of convenience and profits – and in the absence of sufficient waste infrastructure and policies – these undesirable materials and substances are usually dumped in landfills for
a small cost. As a result, Israel dumps 82% of its waste into landfills.
“The situation is not ideal,” says Hila Leo Shapira, project director of Aviv Counseling for the southern-central portion of the Industrial Symbiosis Project. “Although the government augmented the payment per ton for dumping to landfills, it’s still very, very low compared to Europe.”
Europe raised the price per ton of dumping in an effort to discourage the use of landfills, which are known to be a significant source of leachate (fluids that percolate through waste) as well as carbon dioxide and methane emissions.
“In Europe” says Shapira, “you pay the equivalent of 700 shekels per ton, more or less. Here, it was raised from 40 shekels per ton to 109 shekels in 2007, but manufacturers are still dumping in landfills because it’s still the most economical way to deal with waste in Israel. But when it comes to hazardous waste, the numbers are totally different, and it could go up to 2,000 or 3,000 shekels per one ton of waste, depending on how hazardous the waste is.”
The motivation behind the Industrial Symbiosis project, however, has less to do with the environment and more to do with the economy.
“The main reason why the project started was because there was an economic potential that was not being used,” says Arik Ryvkin, director of food tech and circular economy for the Industries Administration in the Economy Ministry. “We have a market failure here because there are around 16,000 factories in Israel and many more organizations that can use each other’s waste for something.”
However, tending to this economic gap also addresses the high rates of landfill-dumping that the Environmental Protection Ministry seeks to reduce. Same goal, different motivations.
At the end of the manufacturing process, a factory can either pay a fixed price to send waste to a landfill, or it can spend an indefinite amount of time and money looking for another company that can use its waste as raw material.
“To solve that problem, we started the Industrial Symbiosis Project,” says Ryvkin. The project itself is managed by two consulting companies: Israel Materials Marketplace (IMM), which handles the industries in northern Israel, and Aviv Counseling, which handles those in the central-southern portion of Israel.
“Basically,” Ryvkin explains, “they are going to every single organization and factory and asking them the kinds of waste they have and the kinds of resources they use. Then they connect the dots.”
THE PROJECT does not cost anything for the factories, manufacturers or other organizations.
“The consulting companies are getting paid by us, not by the organizations themselves, so for the organizations its completely free,” says Ryvkin. “After the consultants connect factory A with factory B, they report to us and say, ‘In this kind of symbiosis, X amount of tons weren’t dumped and it generated X amount of financial value for those companies,’ and then we pay the consulting companies according to their performance.”
Following the end of the project’s pilot year in March 2020, the Economy Ministry evaluated its economic and environmental accomplishments and decided to continue a second year. Since then, the Industrial Symbiosis network has grown substantially.
“We have mapped the waste streams of around 1,400 clients, and in terms of tons, we have mapped 20 million metric tons worth of waste. The challenge is finding industries that will accept this waste,” says Ryvkin. Between IMM and Aviv Counseling, some 80 deals have been brokered thus far, which has prevented 28,000 metric tons of waste from going into a landfill, and generating a direct economic value of NIS 13 million, according to Ryvkin.
The project is slated to be active for another three-and-a-half years. At that point, another evaluation will assess how much it will cost the government to finance the project into the future.
According to current trends and the rate of deals being made, Ryvkin expects the industrial project will be able to bring in 8,000 clients, generate an economic value of NIS 140-150 million, and prevent 500,000 metric tons of waste from being dumped into landfills by the end of the project’s fifth year.
But despite the achievements of industrial symbiosis thus far, and those expected in the coming years, there is still one thing that could reduce environmental and economic waste even further: reducing waste at its source.
“So many materials are on the brink of ending,” says Aviv Counseling’s Shapira, “so of course we need to rethink the way we are using resources and to find ways to repurpose them for another use. But having said that, I want to emphasize that it’s better not to create that waste in the first place.”
To address that baseline waste challenge, the Economy and Environmental Protection ministries also established in March 2020 the Israel Resource Efficiency Center (IREC).
“The scope of our work is inside the factory walls,” says Doron Koll, head of IREC’s Knowledge and Information Center. “We try to minimize the number of raw materials a factory uses, make their operations more efficient, and try to minimize the amount of waste they create.”
IREC has consulted on waste reduction with 60 factories thus far, but conventional production processes make this task far from easy.
“A lot of factories that we go to help to make their inner processes more efficient sometimes still end up creating a lot of waste,” Koll notes. “At which point, we direct them to the Industrial Symbiosis Project.”
Although waste generation seems inevitable, and impossible to avoid, Israel has made progress helping its industries reduce the amount of waste they generate, as well as providing them with financially lucrative options in the form of selling or repurposing their waste for use in raw material streams. By doing so, Israeli industries are beginning to understand and seek out the financial benefits that can be gained through a circular economy and environmental sustainability: a win-win situation.