Julien Beaulieu
Centre de transfert technologique en écologie industrielle (CTTÉI)
Julien Beaulieu holds a M.Ing. degree in chemical engineering from École Polytechnique de Montréal and a civil engineering bachelor degree from Concordia University. He is a researcher and project manager at the Centre de transfert technologique en ecologie industrielle (CTTEI), a technology center specializing in waste recycling, clean production and industrial symbiosis (IS). M. Beaulieu works on the whole cycle of IS development, from training of facilitators, providing technical guidance on waste recycling, improving data collection methods to analyzing the sustainable benefits of IS exchanges. His research interests include valuation of data, IS input/output matching, waste input/output analysis, material flow analysis (MFA), and circularity assessment.
An industrial symbiosis is a network of firms that exchange wastes, energy vectors and by-products (Chertow, 2000). In a facilitated network, brokers act as mediators between businesses (Paquin et al, 2013),mostly by documenting theparticipating firms' inputs and outputs and identifying potential exchanges (Pinna, 2014). The identified projects can be screened by facilitators before being proposed to the firms, who can then proceed to the technical and feasibility study of the proposals.
Inthis article, we analyse the selection factors of potential projects and the success factors of selected projects using a data mining approach. Namely, we constructed classification trees (Breiman et al, 1984), using the CART algorithm implemented in R, based on waste exchanges of the CTTEI (Markewitz et al, 2014) and the NISP industrial symbiosis.
The developed models were able to predict whether an exchange was selected or completed in 66.7% and 62.5% of the time, respectively. The material type wasfound to be the main reason explaining the selection of a project by facilitators. While common materials were more likely to be selected by facilitators, atypical materials weremore likely to be exchanged in an industrial symbiosis setting. Participation of a waste firm was also found to be associated with completed projects. These observations can help facilitators in the choice of the synergies they propose to their participating firms.
Selected references
Breiman, L., Friedman, J., Stone, C. J., & Olshen, R. (1984). Classification and Regression Trees. Chapman and Hall.
Chertow, M. (2000). Industrial symbiosis: Literature and Taxonomy. Annual Review of Energy and Environment, 313-337.
Jacobsen, N. B. (2008). Industrial Symbiosis in Kalundborg, Denmark: A Quantitative Assessment of Economic and Environmental Aspects. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 239-255.
Markewitz, K., Verville, D., & Maheux-Picard, C. (2014). Processus de création d’une symbiose industrielle dirigée : cas des synergies invalidées. Conférence Interdisciplinaire sur l’Ecologie Industrielle et Territoriale. Troyes.
Paquin, R. L., Busch, T., & Tilleman, S. G. (2013). Creating Economic and Environmental Value through Industrial Symbiosis. Long Range Planning.
Pinna, J. (2014). Création d'une symbiose industrielle. Sorel-Tracy: Centre de transfert technologique en écologie industrielle.
• Industrial symbiosis and eco-industrial development , • Open source data, big data, data mining and industrial ecology , • Decision support methods and tools
