This is an area of 10,000 hectares, half of which is land, run by the Rotterdam Municipal Port Management (RMPM). It is a natural deep-water harbour, stretching 50-km inland, which handles 100 million tonne of oil annually. The port is also home to more than 30 chemical manufacturing companies and four refineries. Approximately 60% of land use is in oil and chemicals sectors generating 14,000 direct jobs and 66,000 indirect jobs. The Rotterdam harbour is considered to have a good potential for companies to reuse waste streams, by-products and energy from each other. To help achieve this end the industrial eco-system project (INES) was introduced in the western region of the Rotterdam harbour area, originally initiated by the Europort/Botlek Interests industry association for the development of Environmental Management System (EMS) for 69 member companies. The project team involved a staff member from the industry association, chairman of the environmental management communication platform, a consultant and university researchers.
INES was launched to stimulate the development of cleaner production approaches; to perform network analyses of the activities, material and energy streams; and to develop a knowledge infrastructure to facilitate the functioning of the industrial eco-system in the region. The first INES project was performed in the period 1994-1997 which was followed by the INES Mainport Rotterdam, in operation in the period 1999-2002 and the Rotterdam Harbor and Industry Complex (HIC) in 2003-2007 projects (Baas 1998; Baas et al. 2004; Baas 2005; Heeres et al. 2004).
The following regional synergy examples are documented in this database:
By-Product Synergies
- information not yet available
Utility Synergies
More information about regional synergies in Rotterdam 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 16 February 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.