Industrial Symbiosis Potential and Urban Infrastructure Capacity in Mysore, India

If the material intensive enterprises in a region of three million people shared physical resources that might otherwise be wasted, what environmental and public benefits would result? This study develops an algorithm based on lifecycle assessment tools for determining a city’s industrial symbiosis potential - that is, the sum of the wastes and byproducts from a city’s industrial enterprises that could reasonably serve as resource inputs to other local industrial processes. Rather than report, as do many previous papers, on private benefits to firms, this investigation focuses on public benefits to cities by converting the maximum quantity of resources recoverable by local enterprises into an estimate of the capacity of municipal infrastructure conserved. The results here are based on calculations for the district of Mysore, India. We find that the industrial symbiosis potential calculated based on analysis of the inputs and outputs of ~1,000 urban enterprises, translates into annual diversion from public infrastructure to be 54,000 tonnes of landfill, greater than 80,000 tons of CO2, and 22 million liters per day of wastewater. The method demonstrates how industrial symbiosis links private production and public infrastructure in a city by creating an opportunity to extend the capacity of public infrastructure and create public health co-benefits.