The main source of pollution prevention is the recycling and reuse of waste and end-of-life cycle products. Industrial Symbiosis is where at least two companies exchange their waste. They use this waste to create their product. Companies that have these relationships form an Industrial Ecosystem. Which have two categories: Eco-industrial Parks and Eco-Industrial Networks. There are many case studies regarding this in Greece. In the reading, they identified 455 case studies regarding industrial symbiosis in 16 Eco-Industrial networks. This included small and big businesses. It stated they tried to find case studies that covered a wide range of waste types. They found a total of 45 waste types. Within those types include energy exchange and material resource exchange. These businesses that participate in industrial symbiosis are throughout Greece. To transport materials within the country trucks were mainly used and if it was abroad ships were used.
Waste was separated into different categories including thermal energy, fuels, metals, plastics, chemicals, minerals, and organics. Some of these categories may overlap. Included in this were also tables. The first table was Industrial Parks currently in Greece. Apparently, 30 are established while 24 are either under construction or have not been established yet. The majority of the case studies are from smaller spatial scales, IP and local. As the spatial scale increases the number of cases decreases. Waste was also transported from other countries like Spain, Italy, Russia, China, etc. This is still profitable because shipping the waste across the tea does not cost very much, but it could not be great for the environment. The next table explained the case studies by spatial scale of transportation of waste.
The next table shows the spatial scale of EINs by category and type of waste exchanged. It was found that only certain types of waste were transported at a small spatial scale. Some of these types included: superheated water, malt residues, yeast residues, seed residues, wastepaper, old tires, carbon dioxide, industrial iron scrap, purified iron scrap, electrical furnace iron dross, spent catalysts, marble powder, and industrial polycarbonate waste. It then goes on to talk about certain types of waste and the characteristics of the locations and spatial areas it was transported to.
An example of spatial allocation of companies at the IP scale in Greece is the Eco-Industrial Network of aluminum industries. The aluminum waste is exchanged usually at a national scale, while the end-of-life product is exchanged at a global scale. The last table focuses on the “distribution of case studies by development (industrial) Centre by spatial scale” (6). They noticed out of the 455 case studies, 408 of them are located in the greater areas of Athens, Thessaloniki, Inofyta-Thiva, Volos-Larisa and Patra.