Description
The Circular Economy (CE) has globally redefined competitiveness for businesses and created new development paths for communities. It has become necessary to evolve practices that emphasize collaborative resource sharing between industries, transforming waste into valuable resources.
Industrial Symbiosis (IS), a groundbreaking approach to sustainable development, emphasizes collaborative resource sharing among industries, turning waste into valuable resources. By fostering collaboration, it creates a CE where one industry’s by-products become another’s raw materials. This not only enhances economic viability but also significantly minimises environmental impact.
What steps need to be taken to increase the adoption of Industrial Symbiosis?
In a world grappling with environmental challenges, IS unlocks green growth, reducing production costs while enhancing environmental and social benefits. Despite progress, IS faces barriers such as knowledge gaps hindering its implementation, difficulty in coordinating time and resources among companies, and creating shared business value.
Bridging the gap between sustainability needs, knowledge of IS practices, and emerging professional skills is the challenge that the INSET project aims to address.
Training for the capacity building of the private and public sectors in Industrial Symbiosis is paramount.
- For businesses, it means unlocking cost-saving potential, boosting competitiveness, and fostering innovation.
- Public sectors, on the other hand, play a crucial role in creating conducive policy environments and facilitating inter-industry cooperation.
The INSET project aims to anticipate the changing needs of companies by reducing low-skilled activities in waste management and promoting management and transversal skills to facilitate IS collaboration.
The project Consortium, built up among 6 organizations coming from France, Spain, Slovenia, Lithuania, and Italy, shares the core strategy of:
- Defining a Capacity Building skills map, supporting the implementation of IS
- Develop a digital training toolkit designed to enhance understanding of IIS projects among enterprises, innovation agents, and Vocational Education and Training (VET) providers
- Additionally, an open-access Observatory on IS will raise awareness about relevant regulatory frameworks and existing training courses
- Finally, the INSET Policy Brief will also allow public actors and policymakers to be involved by presenting the needs and challenges of the IS that need to be addressed to remove barriers and make its implementation happen
INSET has a game-changing character due to its main topic, the partners involved, and the necessity of this project to cope with the current environmental crisis and all its impacts.
With a digital and practical approach, INSET aims to implement training and policy briefs that support the development of IS-enabling skills as a circular business model.
In the way the project not only supports enterprises, but also helps to build a workforce capable of innovation, creativity and cooperation in a globalised world, the target audience is not only enterprises, but also vocational education and training providers, public authorities and stakeholders supporting the importance of lifelong learning.
INSET is an Erasmus+ KA2 funded project 2023-1-FR01-KA220-VET-000158456, running from November 2023 to October 2026.
Partners

ASOCIACION EMPRESARIAL DE INVESTIGACION CENTRO TECNOLOGICO DEL MUEBLE Y LA MADERA DE LA REGION DE MURCIA
Reports
All the documents produced by the project will be available for free download.
keep informed with INSET newsletter
Competency map on Industrial Symbiosis
coming soon
Mobile app to allow users to learn about IS through training scenarios with 3 levels of difficulty
coming soon
Report on methodology to compile the analysis of the social, economics, legal and environmental context of IS
Gantt
Competency map on Industrial Symbiosis
06/2024
11/2025
Competency Building for IS – Resources
IS Observatory
09/2026
10/2026
IS Policy Brief