Greening Kenya’s Special Economic Zones and Industrial Parks: Achieving their Competitiveness in the face of Resource Scarcity and a Changing Climate Regime

The culture of industrialization through special economic zones (SEZs) and industrial parks (IPs) is gathering momentum in Kenya. Increasingly, the Kenyan private sector is recognizing that SEZs/ IPs do provide an enabling environment for manufacturing comprising of energy, water, telecommunications, transport, and waste management infrastructure that is non-existent in other manufacturing locations across the country. Because SEZs/ IPs concentrate industries in delimited zones, their strict adherence to the ideals of resource use efficiency and eco-innovation as well as waste and by-product exchange through industrial symbiosis (IS) will enable them increase their productivity and lower their carbon footprints while remaining competitive. Unfortunately, the current master plans governing the planning, design, construction, and operationalization of the country’s SEZs/IPs are based on the wasteful linear economic development model of extracting raw materials, converting them into consumable products and discarding the resultant wastes into the landfill/ dumpsite. This traditional linear economic development model is characterized with linear flows of matter, where raw material inputs are mined, value added into desired products, made use of, and discarded with a trail of waste at every stage of the supply chain. Such an approach to economic development can only be sustainable in a situation where the country is endowed with endless resources for its increasing demand and that land is always available for waste disposal. This is certainly not the case for Kenya. As a result, there is emerging international consensus that over-reliance on wasteful linear economic development models is no longer sustainable. A much more promising economic development model is one that seeks to promote a circular economy that is powered by enhanced resource use efficiency, the adoption of the 3R philosophy of reducing, reusing, and recycling wastes, before engaging industrial symbiosis to deal with the inevitable residual waste. This paper highlights the environmental and socio-economic benefits of the spontaneous evolution of industrial symbiosis at the Athi River SEZ in four clusters. The results reveal a spontaneously emerging cluster network within the economic zone that is largely driven by the prevailing forces of supply and demand; an existing intercompany material flow system that is being hampered by a weak waste recovery and recycling infrastructure; a limited application of the principles of industrial ecology in mitigating the environmental challenges of the economic zone; and a weak governance structure that is incapable of enabling the entire economic zone to assume low-carbon, resource efficient and climate resilient operational status.