The Zaozhuang Industrial Park comprises about 150 hectares and is home to a dozen major companies including a coal based ammonia plant, a heat and power station, a cement mill, a carpet mill, a coke factory, a ceramic factory and a carbide factory (Chen et al. 2001). A wastewater treatment plant and a residential area are located in the park's vicinity. There were only two resource exchanges between the companies in the industrial park. Three companies have a coal fired boiler system and therefore produce some bottom and/or fly-ash which they supply as alternative raw material to the cement mill. Moreover, the power station provides heat to the residential area in winter. The coke factory once tried supplying coke-oven gas to the ceramic factory as fuel for roasting ceramic products, but this failed for unknown technical reasons. An input-output inventory was established for the main operations, and potential linkages identified and assessed (Chen et al. 2001).
Since completion of the Zaozhuang study the Chinese government has made a strong commitment to transition to a Circular Economy, and under that umbrella dozens of eco-industrial development initiatives have been seeded around China. The extent to which any or all of these achieve regional resource synergies in addition to better planning of the industrial estate, remains however unknown (van Berkel 2006).
The following regional synergy examples are documented in this database:
By-Product Synergies
Utility Synergies
More information about regional synergies in Zaozhuang can be found on:
We would be interested to learn from other case study examples that could be added to this database:
This webpage was last modified on February 16, 2007
Disclaimer: The synergy information is provided for general use and although we believe all data to be correct, CSRP can accept no responsibility for the accuracy of the information. All presented case-study examples are retrieved from publicly available resources.