Nature’s Lessons: Creating a Greener Future for Manufacturing

Manufacturing is essential to our lifestyle. With out it, we might not have the provides, meals, clothes, electronics and different issues we use each day. Nevertheless, manufacturing additionally produces waste that usually results in landfills or oceans. 

pure ecosystems supplies a special perspective on this conundrum. There’s little or no waste in nature. For instance, sure micro organism and fungi decompose lifeless natural matter, reintroducing vitamins again into the soil for vegetation to make use of as they develop. 

This evokes the query — what if one producer’s trash might be one other one’s treasure?

Firms might save on waste disposal and uncooked materials sourcing prices. Our planet would additionally profit by retaining doubtlessly beneficial supplies out of landfills. 

For instance, many firms don’t want pristine or drinkable water for his or her manufacturing processes. So, fairly than discarding used water, one other firm can use that water for its personal operations. This idea of useful resource sharing and waste change by way of mutually useful partnerships is known as industrial symbiosis. 

Industrial symbiosis preparations enable firms situated close to one another to share assets simply due to their proximity. For instance, the prices to move supplies between totally different companies will presumably be decrease in the event that they’re close to one another. 

Industrial symbiosis is already being utilized in some elements of the world. The Kalundborg Industrial Symbiosis in Denmark is a well-known instance of this method. During the last 50 years, the Kalundborg partnerships have grown organically by way of elevated consciousness of their financial and environmental advantages. At the moment, 17 associate companies are exchanging greater than 30 different types of supplies, similar to water, sand and ethanol waste. As of 2020, the symbiosis had reportedly saved 4 billion liters of groundwater. This partnership lowered a lot waste that the native vitality provide has develop into carbon-neutral.

Nevertheless, not all makes an attempt at industrial symbiosis have been as profitable. There are a number of challenges to rising these tasks. These embrace the attention and identification of suitable waste change streams, contract negotiations amongst firms, and a lack of awareness of what makes the preparations profitable. That’s why I joined the manufacturing in a circular economy research group at NIST as a postdoctoral researcher to know what makes these networks profitable and the way we will measure their success.

Engineering Requirements for Industrial Symbiosis 

Industrial symbiotic partnerships, similar to these highlighted within the Kalundborg instance, had been acknowledged in a brand new worldwide customary as an important step in making our financial system extra round. Now greater than ever, it is necessary that we develop metrics and analysis strategies to know the well being and viability of all these partnerships.   

Firms thinking about industrial symbiosis need to know the way it will profit them and if the hassle shall be price their time and monetary funding. Moreover, if a enterprise can divert waste utilizing one in every of these partnerships and a neighborhood authorities desires to reward it with a tax break, that authorities would need to know the corporate is assembly its acknowledged sustainability targets. 

However earlier than a typical will be created, we have to examine the issue. That’s the place our group — together with different researchers — is available in. 

I just lately studied numerous examples of real-world industrial symbiosis tasks — each newer and extra established efforts. My aim was to see what I might find out about what makes such a mission profitable. Evaluating these packages permits the organizations working them to be taught from one of the best practices and experiences of others. 

Our work was just lately revealed within the Journal of Cleaner Production, which mentioned seven elements that have an effect on the success of those preparations. 

For instance, profitable, long-term industrial symbiosis tasks reuse considerably extra supplies than newer partnerships do. It’s not shocking that the extra firms profit from these preparations, the extra seemingly they’re to remain in them for the long run, and that’s higher for sustainability.  

Moreover, we studied the cohesiveness of the networks, particularly, how tight or unfastened their ties are to one another. Let’s say there’s an industrial symbiosis mission in an space with one useful resource provider and three shopper firms that provider sells supplies to. If that one provider firm leaves the partnership, the three shopper firms may additionally go away as a result of they don’t have any relationship with one another and no cause to work collectively. 

Extra mature industrial symbiosis networks, in distinction, had extra tightly linked organizations with a number of totally different partnerships amongst each other. Newer ones had fewer partnerships and looser ties. 

Our analysis confirmed that we will examine the traits of firms that make industrial symbiosis profitable without having entry to delicate, proprietary firm info. This implies firms can be at liberty to take part in future analysis like ours — which we in the end hope will assist make our financial system extra round — with out compromising their enterprise. 

Changing into a Sustainability Researcher 

Sustainability and resilience are advanced and multifaceted, and so is researching these matters. It’s not simply science but in addition math, economics and even a little bit of sociology. Sustainability analysis provides me the chance to make use of my curiosity for arithmetic and apply it to deal with advanced, real-world challenges.  

Throughout my undergraduate schooling, I did internships at Georgia Tech, engaged on manufacturing methods for hydrogen gasoline cells. This expertise additional motivated me to pursue graduate analysis in sustainability and local weather change. 

I additionally benefit from the extremely collaborative nature of this analysis. That’s a necessity due to the interdependencies between numerous areas of our human-created setting, similar to manufacturing, vitality and provide chains. 

Actually, my entry level into industrial symbiosis analysis was by way of a collaborative mission! On this mission, a colleague and I demonstrated a novel approach to industrial symbiosis partnerships that cut back consumption and companies’ working prices. 

Since I’ve arrived at NIST as a postdoctoral researcher, I’ve gotten concerned in service and management roles inside the sustainability and resilience analysis group. This 12 months, I led the group of a panel dialogue with eminent consultants within the areas of round financial system and sustainable manufacturing on the 2024 American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ Manufacturing Science and Engineering Convention. 

An essential takeaway from that dialogue was the significance of utilizing sustainability analyses early on in an engineering mission so we will higher perceive the bigger-picture environmental affect of seemingly small choices, similar to selecting supplies for a product. 

Wanting Forward to an Industrially Symbiotic Future 

The alternatives to work with a various group of practitioners and researchers encourage me to proceed studying and advancing this area. I hope to proceed working in infrastructure sustainability and resilience analysis and implementation going ahead in my profession.

I hope that our examine and future research like it would assist to scientifically show what makes industrial symbiosis teams profitable. Over the long run, this might result in requirements that may enable firms to know the place to speculate to advance their enterprise and promote sustainability for everybody.

Making our financial system extra round is a big, advanced problem. But it surely’s thrilling to look to nature for inspiration on how we will preserve supplies in use indefinitely — benefiting each folks and the planet.