Assessing Urban Metabolism through MSW Carbon Footprint and Conceptualizing Municipal-Industrial Symbiosis—The Case of Zaragoza City, Spain

Antonio Valero, Jorge Torrubia, Miguel Ángel Anía and Alicia Torres
Additional contact information
Antonio Valero: Research Centre for Energy Resources and Consumption, Instituto CIRCE, Universidad de Zaragoza, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain
Jorge Torrubia: Research Centre for Energy Resources and Consumption, Instituto CIRCE, Universidad de Zaragoza, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain
Miguel Ángel Anía: Ayuntamiento de Zaragoza, 50003 Zaragoza, Spain
Alicia Torres: Research Centre for Energy Resources and Consumption, Instituto CIRCE, Universidad de Zaragoza, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 22, 1-34

Abstract: This paper proposes a holistic vision of the urban metabolism (UM), viewing the city as a subsystem within an industrial ecosystem (IE) in which municipal-industrial symbiosis is essential to achieve sustainability goals. For this purpose, the metabolism of a large Spanish city, Zaragoza, was studied by analyzing the main fractions of its MSW. A methodology based on carbon footprint (CF) was developed to analyze the environmental impact—in terms of CO 2 —of the influence of households’ behavior, the City Council’s strategies, and the main MSW fractions. Zaragoza’s IE represents a footprint of 931,250 CO 2 tons for the fractions studied, of which 438,000 CO 2 tons are due to organic fraction, 180,371 to plastics and 154,607 to paper and cardboard, which are the three most significant contributors. If households selectively separated 100% of their waste, the footprint would drop to 648,660 tons of CO 2 . Furthermore, monetary savings were quantified through the CO 2 emissions price. The proposed methodology accounts for the CF of the whole IE, not just the city. Moreover, it enables the creation of Sankey diagrams to visualize the distribution of emissions of each subsystem, highlighting the importance of cooperation between the city and its recycling industries to reduce its CF.

Keywords: urban metabolism; MSW management; carbon footprint; industrial symbiosis; household’s behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/22/12724/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/22/12724/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:22:p:12724-:d:681223

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().