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Towards a green economy


on formalising and structuring the waste recovery and recycling process in such a way that it will bring added economic, environmental and social benefits. In the case of e-waste, this implies a high-tech value chain where the production of electronic goods is done by multinational companies in developed and emerging economies. It is a value chain with labour-intensive disassembling work required for the recovering useful parts. The combination of these features could also serve as a basis for the evolution of a different form of symbiosis involving economic actors from developed and developing markets.


Co-generation: combined heat and power Most industrial applications have a need for heat, and most of the potential for co-generation applications can be found in energy-intensive industry sectors such as steel, aluminum, cement, chemicals, pulp and paper. It is technically and economically feasible to recycle high- temperature waste heat or other combustible wastes from industrial enterprises such as coke ovens, steel mills, cement plants, glass producers, brick and ceramic works. This provides the opportunity, should policy and regulation allow, to complement centrally- generated electricity networks with local heat and power systems where electricity is generated and heat re-used at the local industrial site level. It is an opportunity for significant factor-improvements in resource productivity, combined with investment in smart grids.


The world is undoubtedly electrifying, and demand for electric power continues to grow everywhere. Numerous industrial, commercial, and domestic users consume fossil fuel simply for purposes of cooking, hot water, heating air for space-heating, or producing industrial steam at moderate temperatures. There is no technical reason why most of these applications of low-temperature heat could not be supplied by means of small co-generation CHP facilities, based on diesel engines, small gas turbines, high-temperature fuel cells or even rooftop solar collectors. Small CHP systems remain a largely untapped market (Von Weizsaecker et al. 2009). Furthermore, a number of industry sectors have significant potential for generating electricity from waste heat, as in the case of steel mills.


In order to make effective use of such possibilities, it would be necessary for all of these electricity- producing units to be connected to the grid, both to sell their surplus and to buy during occasional periods of breakdown. However, in most countries the electric power industry is a legal monopoly, whether public or private, with exclusive rights of distribution. Besides the natural tendency of inducing inefficiencies across the whole chain of production, distribution and use, such monopolies are acting as major institutional barriers for the development of CHP facilities at different scales.


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The primary problem faced by would-be CHP investors, according to the IEA (2009b), is difficulty in securing a fair market value for any electricity that is exported to the grid. Overcoming these barriers


requires policy


measures that encourage innovative technologies such as CHP, applied to industrial waste heat and waste biomass in particular.


6.2 Policy instruments to enable green manufacturing


The spectrum of instruments available to governmental institutions to shape the enabling environment for greening industry and manufacturing can be categorised as follows:


■ Regulatory and control mechanisms; ■ Economic or market-based instruments; ■ Fiscal instruments and incentives; and ■ Voluntary action, information and capacity building.


An assessment of policy priorities and preferred instruments needs to consider that manufacturing is often dispersed across different countries and industry subsectors, as highlighted in the introduction of this chapter. The industries involved are likely holistic approaches that enable better sharing costs,


to prefer of


responsibilities, resources, and rewards across


manufacturing value chains. This requires, among others, advances in corporate disclosure and governance, fiscal incentives to drive change in the design and take-back of products, policy support for the development of appropriate standards in sustainable manufacturing, and incentives and training to improve existing processes and the retrofitting of factories to be more resource efficient. It requires policy mixes the components of which are discussed below.


Regulatory and control mechanisms The major sources of significant quantities of emissions and effluents in manufacturing industries have traditionally been the initial targets for regulatory and control instruments. Legislation with clearly defined standards of technology and/or performance can drive green investment, encouraging industries to use natural resources more efficiently and create markets for green products and production. Regulatory requirements can build in cleaner technology standards in the licensing of new industrial operations. It can establish emission and discharge standards for industries with clear requirements for the best available or best possible technology (BAT, BPT). However, care needs to be taken that setting standards by regulation does not impede


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