The Benefits of Sharing—Nice Guys and Girls do Finish First - Open-Source Lab: How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs - page 23

The FOSS movement we discussed in Chapter 1 has produced a community of hackers and
computer programmers whose shared goal is to work together to develop beter computer
software [ 22 ] . Similarly, in the FOSH movement, there are burgeoning communities of hackers
and makers working together to build everything from the open-source 3-D printers we will
discuss in Chapter 5 and scientific research tools [ 23 ] , the topic of this topic to DIY drones,
which is the largest amateur unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) community in history. 16
2.4 Industrial Strength Sharing
In the area of competition, natural selection takes place not only among individuals but also
when groups compete with other groups. Here, our intuition about cooperation among team-
mates is correct and we have a form of group selection—the best team wins, just like in football
for basketball. Even in the most cut-throat competitive business world, there is overwhelm-
ing evidence of the advantage of companies cooperating with others to gain a competitive
advantage over their rivals. In fact, there is a whole discipline that has grown to study these
interactions: industrial ecology, which is the study of material and energy flows through in-
dustrial systems. One of the most useful concepts to emerge from this new discipline is that
of industrial symbiosis. In industrial symbiosis , traditionally separate industries are considered
collectively to gain competitive advantage by instituting the mutually beneficial physical ex-
change of materials, energy, water, and/or other by-products. Such a system collectively op-
timizes material and energy use at efficiencies beyond those achievable by any individual pro-
cess alone. The key benefits of industrial symbiosis are collaboration and the synergies ofered
by geographic proximity [ 24 ] . Industrial symbiotic systems such as the now-classic network
of companies in Kalundborg, Denmark have spontaneously evolved from a series of microin-
novations of by-product sharing over a long timescale [ 25 , 26 ] . At the center of the Kalundborg
ecoindustrial park is the 1500 MW Asnaes Power Station, which supplies surplus (1) heat to
3500 local homes/residences and a nearby fish farm, (2) gypsum from the sulfur dioxide scrub-
ber to a wallboard manufacturer, (3) sludge for use as fertilizer on local farms, and (4) steam
to a Statoil plant and Novo Nordisk, a pharmaceutical and enzyme manufacturer. This reuse
of by-products (what less advanced industries call “waste”) reduces landfill load and mining,
and reuse of heat reduces the amount of thermal pollution discharged to a nearby fjord. Fur-
thermore, fly ash and clinker from the power plant is used for road building and cement pro-
duction. These are only a few of the dozens of corporate mutually beneficial links found in
the Kalundborg system. To catalog them all is far beyond the scope of this topic and unneces-
sary. However, it is important to understand how this type of collaboration among firms has
enormous economic benefits. To illustrate this point on a smaller ecoindustrial system, con-
sider a multi-Gigawat solar PV factory at the center of a next generation ecoindustrial park
made up of eight symbiotic factories as seen schematically in Figure 2.4 [ 27 ] .