Towards the development of an online platform for an industry metabolic pathway

This paper presents the design of a web-based decision co-creation platform to showcase water treatment technologies connected via industrial symbiosis for a circular economy approach. The platform is developed as part of the EU H2020-funded ULTIMATE project. This system initially investigates three case studies focusing respectively on: water and nutrient recovery in greenhouses, pre-treatment of wastewater from olive mills before integration into communal wastewater systems, and value-added compound recovery from wastewater in a juice factory. These cases are then merged into one abstract composite example showing all three aspects of the problem, connecting greenhouses, juice factories, and olive mills, describing a pioneering form of industrial 'metabolic network' of the circular economy. This work describes the modelling framework, the online platform and the interactive visualisations that allow users to explore the industrial symbiosis configurations enabled by the metabolic pathway. The platform thus serves as a decision support tool that merges circular economy and industrial symbiosis, as well as a pedagogical tool.