RISERS – A Roadmap for Industrial Symbiosis standardisation for Efficient Resource Sharing

RISERS project addresses developing a roadmap that defines areas, directions and proposes actions where standards are needed to advance industrial symbiosis with focus on priority resources and synergies demonstrating the highest symbiotic potential in Europe.
Industrial symbiosis (IS) refers to collaborative and mutually profitable relationships between different industries and/or sectors to improve resource utilisation and productivity based on business opportunities. It creates an interconected industrial landscape where one company or sector uses underutilised resources such as: as waste, by-products, residues, energy, water, infrastructures, capacity, expertise, equipment, materials from another company or sector with the result of keeping resources in productive use for longer and for an economic profit.

Key activities of the RISERS project involve: identification of priority synergies between industries and sectors together with resources most relevant for industrial symbiosis, strengthening the links between R&I and standardisation to valorise and integrate R&I results into IS standardisation processes, cooperation with policy makers to develop policy frameworks in support of industrial symbiosis and engagement with standardisation experts to develop a Standardisation Roadmap for boosting IS impact complemented with guidelines for technical committees to address industrial symbiosis in standardisation processes.

The project capitalises on the Workshop Agreement (CWA 17354) ‘Industrial Symbiosis: Core Elements and Implementation Approaches’ published by the European Committee for Standardisation (CEN). It provides a consensus on the core elements of industrial symbiosis to enable its identification and on good practice approaches to implementation across Europe and beyond.

Project consortium:

• Enspire Science Ltd.
• Comite Europeen De Normalisation (CEN) Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN)
• EIT Raw Materials GMBH
• Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI)of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e. V.
• Universiteit Gent, International Synergies Ltd.
• Instytut Ekologii Terenów Uprzemysłowionych
• ISQ

Project implementation period: 01.01.2024 – 31.12.2026

Agreement number: ID: 101135539

Project Coordinator at IETU: Izabela Ratman-Kłosińska, e-mail:

Project website:

Additional reading: CEN WORKSHOP AGREEMENT CWA 17354, Industrial Symbiosis: Core Elements and Implementation Approaches, December 2018 https://www.cencenelec.eu/media/CEN-CENELEC/CWAs/RI/cwa17354_2018.pdf

Funding source:

HORIZON.2.4 - Digital, Industry and Space
HORIZON-CL4-2023-HUMAN-01-62 - Boosting industrial symbiosis by standardisation (CSA)
HORIZON-CL4-2023-HUMAN-01