Kwinana Industrial Area: agglomeration economies and industrial symbiosis on Western Australia's Cockburn Sound

The Kwinana Industrial Area is nearing its 60th anniversary as a resource-processing industrial cluster. Its longevity may be understood in the traditional terms of industrial inertia resulting from three types of agglomeration economies: localisation, transfer, and urbanisation economies. However, industrial ecology provides an alternative approach to describe the environmental impacts of interplant linkages: utility/infrastructure sharing, supply-chain synergies, by-product exchanges, and joint provision of services. The agglomeration economies and industrial symbiosis approaches to clustering are compared using interplant relationships drawn from the case of Kwinana.