Page 113 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

Ch003-P373623.qxd 3/22/07 5:29 PM Page 92
Sustainable Industrial Design and Waste Management
92
would not our industrial system behave like an ecosystem where the waste
of a species may be the resource to another species?” (Wikipedia, 2006). One
industrial park located in Kalundborg, Denmark, has established a prototype
for efficient reuse of bulk materials and energy wastes among industrial
facilities. The park houses a petroleum refinery, power plant, pharmaceuti-
cal plant, wallboard manufacturer, and fish farm that have established dedi-
cated streams of processing wastes (including heat) between facilities in the
park. The gypsum from neutralization (“scrubbing”) of the sulfuric acid pro-
duced by a power plant is used by a wallboard manufacturer; spent fermen-
tation mash from a biological plant is being used as a fertilizer, and so on. For
more detail regarding Kalundborg, see case study on p. 100. The success of
the EIP depends on the ability to innovate, access to talent, markets, and the
ability to meet profit conditions or cost constraints and on achieving close
cooperation between different companies and industrial facilities.
Nemerow (1995) defines EIP as “a selective collection of compatible
industrial plants located together in one area (complex) to minimize both
environmental impact and industrial production costs. These goals are
accomplished by utilizing the waste materials of one plant as the raw mate-
rials for another with a minimum of transportation, storage and raw material
preparation.” There are a lot of definitions regarding EIP but all of them have
taken into consideration the three main criteria for sustainable development
namely, environmental, economic and social dimension and they emphasize
the main role of eco-industrial parks as a tool for industrial ecology and for
achieving the objectives of sustainable development.
From the above discussions, one can defend EIP as “a community of
manufacturing and service businesses seeking conservation of natural and
economic resources in order to reduce production cost and protect the envi-
ronment as well as public and occupational health”. The word community
can be defined as a local community within the same facility or surrounding
community within the industrial estate or nearby community or global com-
munity across a broader region. The global community is not yet realized
because of distances. This could be done between two industrial estates where
some wastes might match different industries in two different communities,
especially if the industrial communities were not designed initially to act as
an EIP.
EIP aims at achieving economic, environmental, social, and government
benefits as follow:

• Economic: Reduce raw material and energy cost, waste management
cost, treatment cost, and regulatory burden, and increase competitive-
ness in the world market as well as the image of the companies.
• Environmental: Reduce demand on finite resources and make natural
resources renewable. Reduce waste and emissions to comply with
environmental regulations. Make the environment and development
sustainable.