Territorial Agglomeration and Industrial Symbiosis: Sitakunda‐Bhatiary, Bangladesh, as a Secondary Processing Complex

Abstract

[Correction added after online publication March 16, 2011: The contact information for two authors was listed incorrectly. The email addresses for Farid Uddin Ahamed and Nasreen Akter have been corrected in this version.] This article both joins with recent arguments in economic geography that have made connections between work on industrial symbiosis and agglomerative tendencies and recasts this work. Drawing on the case of Sitakunda‐Bhatiary, Bangladesh, it shows that symbiosis is intricately bound up in the global circulation of wastes and their recovery through secondary processing. It draws attention to the importance of key places as conduits in the transformation of materials and secondary processing; emphasizes their importance as sites of symbiotic activity; and shows how such places exemplify economies of recycling, reuse, and remanufacturing, but in conditions of minimal environmental regulation. It therefore shows that contemporary symbiosis is not necessarily clean and green and may be very messy; that it can be generative of agglomerations, not just dependent upon prior agglomerations; that such agglomerations may be cross sectoral, not just interplant; and that symbiosis needs to be thought of not just through geographic proximity, but through the spatialities of globalization.

From Waste to Resource: The Trade in Wastes and Global Recycling Economies

“…A good example is the Sitakunda-Bhatiary area near Chittagong, Bangladesh, which provides a classic illustration of the ways in which reuse, remanufacturing and resource recovery for recycling can exist in a symbiotic relationship [164]. Whilst NGO campaigns focused their attention on the ship breaking activity taking place on the beaches, this research points to ship breaking's vertical integration with a Bangladesh steel industry based on secondary production, and the close connection between that industry's emergence and the closure of primary steel manufacture in post-Independence Bangladesh.…”

Interrogating the circular economy: the moral economy of resource recovery in the EU

“…It figures as the must-cite case in paper after paper in the industrial symbiosis literature. We have reviewed this body of work elsewhere (Gregson et al 2012), but to recap, Kalundborg, first described by Ehrenfeld & Gertler (1997), is a complex emerging over some 25 years featuring four core plants: a coal-fired power station, an oil refinery, a pharmaceutical plant and a plasterboard manufacturing plant. Waste heat is exchanged from the power station to the other plants and to a CHP (combined heat and power) district heating system.…”

“…The challenge facing the drive to create circular economies from wastes in Europe, then, is three-fold. First, to process discarded goods and materials in such a way that they become tradable as goods within EU markets (EEA, 2011); secondly, to do this in the face of well-established global recycling markets which turn wastes to resources but where the demand for recyclates is international (Alexander & Reno, 2012;Gregson et al 2012;Crang et al, 2013); and thirdly, to do this in conditions of strong environmental regulation, clean production and high labour costs. EU plans correctly point out the need for high quality, that is, pure recyclates.…”

Stewardship of things: The radical potential of product stewardship for re-framing responsibilities and relationships to products and materials

“…Despite the flaws of environmental stewardship certification schemes such as FSC and MSC they do engage with the global nature of contemporary production systems and attribute economic value to compliance with environmental standards. While in some countries there are signs of government driven investment in extracting economic value from post-consumption goods and materials, especially in response to increasing scarcity of metals and 'rare earth minerals' (reference to Japanese waste mining investment), the bulk of activity and innovation in this area currently occurs outside regulatory regimes in developing countries where wages are minimal and working conditions precarious (Gregson et al 2012). If EM is to become a meaningful global project, further theoretical work is needed to understand it in terms of the political economy of material flows across all scales from the global to the micro, without missing the opportunities which lie at the mesoscale.…”