Project

Started in January 2024, this three-year initiative will pave a way to develop standards relevant to support building symbiotic collaborations among industries and sectors that allow keeping resources in productive use for longer.

Industrial symbiosis (IS) refers to collaborative and mutually profitable relationships between different industries and/or sectors to improve resource utilisation and productivity based on business opportunities. It creates an interconnected industrial landscape where one company or sector uses underutilised resources such as: as waste, by-products, residues, energy, water, infrastructures, capacity, expertise, equipment, materials from another company or sector with the result of keeping resources in productive use for longer and for an economic profit.

Despite obvious benefits, industrial symbiosis is still not a widely adopted practice for building future-proof industries due to a number of reasons. The processes to establish a symbiotic relationship are complex, opportunities lie often outside one sector, often involve large players excluding SMEs and require involvement of many stakeholders. To build win-win cases and incentivise industrial symbiosis, industries and policy makers need a robust framework applicable to diverse industrial settings. It should ensure that terms and principles pertaining to industrial symbiosis are commonly agreed and understood among stakeholders, resources are interchangeable among industries and industry sectors, the systems, practices and processes are compatible, interoperable and comply with regulatory requirements, the relevant data and information formats and technical solutions are available and R&I results are integrated.

The European-funded project RISERS addresses these challenges by developing a roadmap that defines areas, directions and proposes actions where standards are needed to advance industrial symbiosis with focus on priority resources and synergies demonstrating the highest symbiotic potential in Europe.

Key activities of the RISERS project involve: identification of priority synergies between industries and sectors together with resources most relevant for industrial symbiosis, strengthening the links between R&I and standardisation to valorise and integrate R&I results into IS standardisation processes, cooperation with policy makers to develop policy frameworks in support of industrial symbiosis and engagement with standardisation experts to develop a Standardisation Roadmap for boosting IS impact complemented with guidelines for technical committees to address industrial symbiosis in standardisation processes.

The project capitalises on the Workshop Agreement (CWA 17354) ‘Industrial Symbiosis: Core Elements and Implementation Approaches’ published by the European Committee for Standardisation (CEN). It provides a consensus on the core elements of industrial symbiosis to enable its identification and on good practice approaches to implementation across Europe and beyond.