The Café and the Compost

Abstract

Kalundborg is a small port on the west coast of Zealand, in Denmark. Over several decades from the 1960s, a handful of firms there began to trade what they would otherwise have thrown away. By the late 1980s the arrangement had a name, industrial symbiosis, and visitors were arriving to study it. It became the case every textbook on the circular economy reaches for. The most useful account of it is one of the first. In 1997, John Ehrenfeld and Nicholas Gertler published "Industrial Ecology in Practice: The Evolution of Interdependence at Kalundborg" in the first volume of the Journal of Industrial Ecology . Their finding was not the one visitors tended to take home. The links among the firms, they wrote, had come about through "a sequence of independent, economically driven actions". No master plan had produced them. Each exchange had been agreed because it made sense to the two parties at the time. And they warned that the pattern "may not be easily transferable to greenfield developments": that is, to new sites designed from the start to be symbiotic.