What, where, and how measuring industrial symbiosis: A reasoned taxonomy of relevant indicators

During the last two decades, the literature devoted great attention to industrial symbiosis (IS) as an effective strategy to achieve environmental, economic, and social benefits. Accordingly, a wide range of numerical indicators – highly different among them for scope, definition, purpose, and applications – have been developed, to characterize and measure IS. The paper proposes a taxonomy of these indicators with the aim of facilitating their adoption and proper usage in practice. The taxonomy is developed on the basis of a literature review and is addressed to answer three main questions: (1) what to measure, (2) where to measure, and (3) how to measure. This offers a clear picture of available relevant IS indicators in terms of purpose, context, and methodology.