Leveraging the power of eco-industrial parks to boost the productivity and competitiveness of Kenya’s Ruaraka industrial zone

n 2017, the Kenyan Government launched its Green Economy Strategy and Implementation Plan (GESIP) for the period 2016 - 2030. This clearly demonstrated that the Government was determined to embrace a development trajectory that is low-carbon, resource efficient, equitable, and socially inclusive. The strategy’s thematic area four recognizes the need to treat waste as a resource. It is against this background that the Kenya Industrial Research and Development Institute decided to partner with the Ruaraka business community and the Technical University of Denmark in seeking to develop a framework that will facilitate waste and by-product exchange through industrial symbiosis at the Ruaraka industrial cluster. The aim was to assess the possibility of waste from one company being used as a raw material for the other through the establishment of an interactive company input/output, waste and by-product database that will form the basis for inter-company negotiations that will eventually yield the desired material exchanges. The methodology involved interviews with factory personnel; execution of detailed in-plant assessments; review of company production and utility records, and the identification of environmentally and technically feasible waste exchanges. It makes economic, social and environmental sense for manufacturing companies to embrace resource efficient circular economy development models.