Promoting Circular Economy Through Industrial Symbiosis Platforms: A Comparative Analysis

Circular economy has been claimed as an approach to foster a systemic change in the current model based on disposability. Though, many companies have sprout to deliver circular solutions through either new business models, products or services, a full shift away from the entire system is lacking. In other words, in order to experience a fully transition toward a circular economy model, an inter-organizational approach needs to be deployed. This approach has been named industrial symbiosis whereby interactions among companies are crucial to start developing a circular economy in the so-called meso level. Collaboration among organizations rises as one of the most important factors in developing industrial symbiosis. In that sense, different projects have developed digital platforms with the idea of promoting active participation and collaboration between organizations. Those sorts of platforms ideally enable industrial symbiosis through gathering information about resources and potential substitutes in order to recommend waste-to-resource exchanges. However, depending on the context the platform was built certain characteristics may not apply. Thus, this paper is focused on the characteristics and usefulness of different available platforms that facilitate the exchange of waste as a resource, product or good. Based on this research, it is likely that none of the existing platforms and the upcoming ones will be one-size-fits-all, thus, for industrial symbiosis to succeed it is still important for companies to determine what their needs are and then explore which platform best covers their requirements.