Using Ecological Network Analysis to Assess an Automotive Eco-Industrial Park for Sustainable Manufacturing

A key element for achieving sustainable manufacturing is efficient and effective resource use, which can potentially be achieved by encouraging symbiotic thinking among multiple manufacturers and industrial actors and establish resource flow structures that are analogous to material flows in natural ecosystems. Eco-industrial parks (EIPs) represent a strategic approach to sustainable industrial development by promoting resource efficiency, waste minimization, and symbiotic collaboration among industrial actors. This paper focuses on creating an eco-industrial park around an automotive assembly facility. Various scenarios are explored to increase interaction and circularity among various actors in the local automative ecosystem. Ecological Network Analysis (ENA), an approach used in benchmarking natural ecosystem, is applied to evaluate the various water, material and energy network improvements. The analyses show how to improve current structure of an automotive industrial ecosystem and quantitatively assess the network modifications without actual (often proprietary) resource flow data. By using ENA, it is also possible to compare the various EIP designs with actual natural ecosystems using various ENA metrics. Although improved, the resulting EIPs still lag compared to natural ecosystems with respect to some key metrics.