Industrial Symbiosis

Industrial symbiosis (as parallel to biological symbiosis) describes the formation of long-term partnerships and work in solidarity of different industries in order to enhance both environmental performance and competitive capacity by exchanging and optimising mutual flows of material, energy and water through systems at different scales, from products to factories and up to national and global levels. Typical examples of industrial symbiosis are exchange of a variety of by-products that become feedstocks in other processes or cooling water, whose heat can be recovered in aquaculture (e.g. fishponds).