Cleaner Production and Industrial Symbiosis

The focus is on preventive measures that significantly reduce the environmental impacts and the total costs of production processes to increase the competitiveness of the products produced while protecting the environment and maintaining the ecosystem services. The term resource efficient production highlights the increasing demand to significantly reduce resources consumption in production of goods or the provision of services and to seek a decoupling from economic growth.

The concept of industrial symbiosis / ecology fosters closed material cycles to reduce waste streams and end of pipe solutions (circular economy). In this process, entire industrial areas, business models, or even business policies have to be co-created and optimized based on the role model of natural ecosystems.