Semantic approach for pre-assessment of environmental indicators in Industrial Symbiosis

Industrial Symbiosis (IS) is a growingly accepted paradigm for processing waste into material, energy and water with benefits to participants measured by economic, environmental and social gains. Despite of some attempts to quantify them no unified metrics or methods for calculating concomitant indicators have been proposed. This paper presents a systemisation of IS relevant environmental metrics and a semantic approach based on knowledge modelling using ontologies to facilitate a priori calculation of respective indicators. The approach and metrics are presented and verified with a case study. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.