Evaluation of Government Incentive Policy on Industrial Waste Utilization by Agent-Based Simulation of Industrial Symbiosis Network

With the increasing concern about the limitation of available resources, industry symbiosis (IS) has emerged as one of the mechanisms to achieve sustainable industrial ecology. However, the economic benefit is always the factory’s primary consideration, few factories will consider implementing IS unless they see certain economic benefits. Governmental policies are the main factors to facilitate and stimulate IS development. Unfortunately, how governmental policy actions influence the development of IS is not completely clear. This article investigates the government subsidy policy and proposes an agent-based simulation study to investigate the relationship between this kind of policy and the industry symbiosis practice from the government’s perspective. We found the expected results, which is that the subsidy policy can positively influence the emergence of the IS relationships which will eventually reduce the waste disposal to the landfill, beneficial to the environment. Moreover, from the simulation experiments, we also find that when incentives reach a certain level, they no longer work. Even if the value of the subsidy is increased, the amount of waste utilization will not increase anymore. We think that our research can serve as a reference for the policymakers who are interested in creating incentive policies to stimulate the IS practice and achieve more sustainable industrial development.