Why companies do not implement industrial symbiosis?
This paper is aimed at highlighting the main barriers hampering the development of the industrial symbiosis (IS) practice. The study is divided into two parts. First, a systematic literature review was conducted, in order to identify the barriers mentioned in the literature. 77 papers published by scientific international journals were analyzed and the barriers to IS were classified according to their nature (i.e., technical, economic, legal, and strategic) and according to five steps of IS (i.e., awareness, feasibility assessment, partner identification, implementation, and operation over time). Then, a survey was designed, in order to collect feedback from IS experts on the extent to which the barriers identified by the literature review are perceived as significant.