Inês Santos Costa

• PhD Environmental Engineering
• Associate Partner at Deloitte

Artigo para o Relatório do Estado do Ambiente de 2017, relacionado com o tema da Economia Circular e o Plano de Ação nacional.

Over the last 40 years the developed economies have enjoyed relative abundance, with easy access to resources, and at affordable prices, resulting in a largely linear way of life: we extract resources, process and transform them into consumer goods and, once used, they are discarded. This model has led to rapid economic growth in many countries (e....

Under an extended producer responsibility (EPR) system, when a producer delivers a product to the market it must also pay a takeback fee, which is used to cover the costs of end-of-life disposal. EPR systems are currently used in Europe and beyond to manage a variety of products, including packaging and used tires. In this article we develop an inp...

Industrial symbiosis activities show considerable diversity across social contexts. Within the boundaries of Europe alone, substantial differences exist in the ways that industrial symbiosis manifests itself. This variability presents challenges to define and identify the phenomena in the context of an internationally comparative study. This chapte...

This book covers updated perspectives on eco-industrial parks across the world. It is an excellent work done by researchers with different background and culture. History, barriers, institutional arrangements, policies, waste management, and greenhouse gas emissions, together with eco-industrial parks, are all discussed so that decision makers from...

Promoting the recovery of waste produced by companies in urban areas through Inter-firm relations such as Industrial Symbiosis, Resource Recovery or In-House Reuse can be seen as good approaches to achieve materials loop closure and foster self-reliance (resilience), by decreasing dependence of external sources. In this article the industrial waste...

The year 2013 was a challenge for the Portuguese economy. Continuing the ongoing 2012 trend of financial adjustment, the economy contracted -1,5% and private consumption decreased, but at a slower rate than in 2012, from -5,4% to -2% (ME, 2014). However, the forecast of international institutions is encouraging (PEProbe, 2014): as conditions improv...

The paper presents ongoing research performed by a network of European researchers on the development and diffusion of industrial symbiosis in European countries. The research has a number of aims: 1. To find out the nature of industrial symbiosis by finding out the national peculiarities as well as points of correspondence in countries with varyin...

Abstract This article provides an assessment of waste management evolution in Portugal, with a particular emphasis on the performance brought by the adoption of several EPR schemes, namely the ones developed for packaging (general, medicine and plant protection products), used tires, used mineral oils, end-of-life vehicles(ELV), waste electrical an...

The impact of the management of packaging waste on the environment, economic growth and job creation is analyzed in this paper. This integrated assessment intends to cover a gap in the literature for this type of studies, using the specific case study of the Portuguese packaging waste management system (SIGRE). The net environmental benefits assoc...

Portugal is at a turning point in terms of its future development. The recent economic downturn led to a strategy based on a fiscal adjustment package, primarily based on cutting public spending, reduction of tax expenditure and additional privatisations. In this economic context, the natural approach to eco-innovation is to favour resource efficie...

IS generally implies a self-organizing business strategy among firms that are willing to cooperate to improve their economic and environmental performance, by exchanging waste and by-product materials or energy and using them in substitution of a primary resource. The second approach uses data on waste exchanges carried within Lisbon's metropolitan...

Industrial symbiosis (IS) emerged as a collective, multi-industrial approach to improve economic and environmental performance through the use of wastes/by-products as substitutes for raw materials. The development of IS initiatives depends on the context in which they occur, characterised in terms of social, economic, political, spatial and tempor...

Industrial symbiosis (IS) emerged as a self-organizing business strategy among firms that are willing to cooperate to improve their economic and environmental performance. The adoption of such cooperative strategies relates to increasing costs of waste management, most of which are driven by policy and legislative requirements.Development of IS dep...