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Industrial Symbiosis
- when the environment and business go hand in hand. Environmental consideration is also cool business – and ordinary common sense. Industrial Symbiosis Kalundborg – first and the world leader – is a good example of this.
Industrial Symbiosis
Industrial Symbiosis is a network collaboration between a number of industries, waste disposal companies and Kalundborg Forsyning, via which the partners make commercial use of each other’s waste and bi-products. This enables them to increase productivity - without correspondingly increasing their consumption of water, energy or other resources. This keeps production costs down while benefitting the environment at the same time. See how:
Energy collaboration
Ten per cent of the energy consumed in Denmark is produced in Kalundborg. This results in annual CO2 emissions of some 4.3 million tonnes – half of which comes from surplus heat from production. Industrial Symbiosis members the StatoilHydro Refinery, Novo Nordisk and Novozymes receive some of this surplus heat in the form of waste steam to power part of their production. The makes for an annual reduction in CO2 emissions of some 240,000 tonnes.
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Bi-product collaboration
The smoke produced by Asnæsværket power station has the sulphur filtered out before it is allowed to leave the chimney stack. Cleansing is done using limestone and recycled water – and the result of this chemical process is industrial gypsum. This gypsum – some 100,000 tonnes of it a year – is used by Gyproc to produce plasterboard for the construction industry. Similarly, the yeast which is a by-product of Novo Nordisk's production of insulin is used to feed some 800,000 pigs a year. The sludge from Kalundborg Municipal Council's waste water treatment works is used by RGS 90 as a nutrient in its soil cleansing processes. Finally, Nova Nordisk and Novozymes manufacture an annual 150,000 tonnes of the fertiliser product NovoGro from its waste water treatment installation.
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Water collaboration
Altogether, the companies in Industrial Symbiosis consume some 10,000,000 m³ of water every year at their production plants. Almost one third of this – 3 million m³ – is recirculated and recycled by members of the symbiosis, reducing the companies' costs and relieving a lot of pressure from the public water supply.
The future
New to the symbiosis relationship is Inbicon's bioethanol plant in Kalundborg, which uses surplus heat from the Asnæsværket power station, reducing overall emissions of CO2 by an annual 25,000 tonnes. The partners of the symbiosis collaboration are also working to optimise water recycling so that as much as 200,000 m³ of clean water, delivered as waste steam, is returned to the Asnæsværket power station instead of going down the drain. Finally, the partners of the symbiosis collaboration are also continuously studying the potential of alternative energy sources in their production processes, while new collaboration ventures have emerged, e.g. for the extraction of biogas from waste water.
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