Intermédiation des transactions d’écologie industrielle. Le rôle d’Écopal au sein de l’écosystème dunkerquois

Industrial ecology urges companies to reduce their impact on the natural environment by drawing lessons from Nature itself. Based on the cyclic functioning of natural ecosystems, it contributes to implement a circular economy where the waste of one company becomes a valuable resource for another one. If industrial ecology brings a new perspective to waste, they are not a classical merchandise easy to trade. Its implementation challenges the representations and beliefs within companies and requires collaboratives mindsets. Through the qualitative case study of the Dunkerquois industrial ecosystem, we highlight how the Écopal association has contributed to implement industrial ecology among its members. Since its creation in 2001, it has helped companies to rethink and reorganize their industrial flows and processes through the gradual implementation of waste transactions. Thus, the shared-waste collections have produced ?quick wins? enabling Écopal to increase its members? embeddedness in the process and to go further and deeper towards industrial ecology. However, such practices remain complicated to implement and sustain, and Écopal has experienced a great deal of difficulties, whether they are economic, regulatory, technical, or behavioral. Through these results, we contribute to bring a management science perspective to industrial ecology. Our case study shows how a third-party organization can act as a facilitator and a matchmaker orchestrating eco-industrial cooperation within an industrial ecosystem. However, even though it absorbs some transaction costs related to the identification and the establishment of waste transactions, it also causes coordination costs related to the orchestration of the relationships between the ecosystem members. Finally, this research shows that a third party can play a crucial part in changing the perspective of local stakeholders regarding waste as well as activating geographical and organized proximities between them, and take a part in the transition towards a circular economy.