Abstract
Eco-industrial parks (EIPs) are of increasing importance for implementing industrial ecology strategies and are facing increasing challenges in terms of environmental pollution and resource scarcity. As a complex adaptive system, an EIP involves multiple sectors and faces various disturbances that influence its evolutionary trajectories. This study adopts an agent-based model to simulate the material flows and industrial symbiosis process in the EIP, considering the initiative of each company and the ever-changing environment. The proposed EIP model emphasises the heterogeneity of companies and attempts to reflect multiple and dynamic factors that have received less attention in previous studies. This model contains two types of agents, companies and the external environment. A company agent makes decisions and interacts with other agents following its own behaviour rules, while the external environment agent functions to coordinate the material flows and exert influence on the companies. The model has been verified and validated by simulating a 20-year-period development of an empirical EIP in China. The simulation results are assessed by three indicators: eco-connectance, eco-efficiency, and industrial symbiosis indicator. Results showed that during the growing phase, the eco-connectance increased from 0.02 to 0.1 for the non-disturbance situation. The eco-efficiency and industrial symbiosis indicator also realised 78.5% and 74.8% of their total increments. The outcome of this research provides insights for the design of the strategies to improve the industrial symbiosis performance and is of high potential to facilitate EIPs in promoting eco-transformation and sustainable development.
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Funding
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 41801196, 41971255); the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (grant number ZR2019BD021); the Youth Science Funds of Shandong Academy of Sciences (grant number 2020QN0029); the Taishan Scholar Program of Shandong province and the Think Tank Project of Shandong Academy of Sciences; and the EU supported project Sustainable Process Integration Laboratory – SPIL funded as project No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000456, by Czech Republic Operational Programme Research and Development, Education, Priority 1: Strengthening capacity for quality research.
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Feng Han: Conceptualization; methodology; software; writing, original draft; funding acquisition. Mingxing Sun: Data curation, proofreading. Xuexiu Jia: Writing — review and editing. Jiří Jaromír Klemeš: Writing — review and editing, proofreading. Feng Shi: Funding acquisition, proofreading. Dong Yang: Supervision, writing — reviewing and editing.
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Han, F., Sun, M., Jia, X. et al. Agent-based model for simulation of the sustainability revolution in eco-industrial parks. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 23117–23128 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-17503-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-17503-5