Beneath and above the streets of Ulsan’s Eco-Industrial Park (EIP), a network of pipelines carries steam from a municipal waste incineration facility to nearby factories. What was once a disposal problem has become a shared energy source, cutting costs for manufacturers and emissions for the city.
For Rwanda, this is more than a technical curiosity. It may offer a way to build competitive manufacturing, and creating jobs, while avoiding the trade-offs that have shaped industrialization elsewhere.
Through the World Bank-supported Green Industrialization through Industrial Parks and Special Economic Zones (GIIPS) program, financed by the Korea Green Growth Trust Fund (KGGTF), Rwanda is strengthening the policy, institutional, and infrastructure foundations for a new generation of industrial parks.
Eco-industrial parks are industrial zones where businesses collaborate to share resources—such as energy, water, materials, information and infrastructure—to reduce costs, minimize waste, and improve environmental performance.
By lowering production costs and creating new industries around recycling, environmental services, and clean technologies, they can help sustain existing manufacturing jobs while generating new green employment opportunities.
In May 2026, a high-level Rwandan delegation visited Korea to see how this model works in practice and what it could mean for Africa.
How Korea Strengthened Competitiveness Through Green Industrialization
Korea’s transformation is one of the most striking in modern economic history. In the 1960s, nearly 80 percent of its workforce was in agriculture. Industrialization began with fertilizers and petrochemicals, reflecting immediate development priorities. Ulsan, now home to the world’s largest automobile plant and one of the largest shipbuilding complexes, was then a small fishing village.
As Korea’s economy matured, rising wages and costs created pressure to offshore production, a trend that hollowed out industrial bases in many advanced economies. Korea responded differently. Instead of relocating, it reduced production costs at home by redesigning industrial systems.
Within its industrial parks, waste heat became energy inputs; wastewater was treated and reused, and industrial by-products were reintegrated into production cycles. These changes reduced costs, created new revenue streams, and strengthened in the case for firms to remain in Korea. In this model, environmental efficiency became a driver of industrial competitiveness.
Building Industrial Symbiosis by Design
Unlike the gradual, firm-by-firm evolution of industrial symbiosis seen in places such as Kalundborg in Denmark, Korea took a deliberate and systematic approach.
It developed eco-industrial parks as a national strategy—scaling collaboration across hundreds of industrial parks, supported by policy, institutions, and targeted investments.
This mattered because industrial symbiosis does not emerge automatically.
Identifying opportunities for resource sharing requires information, coordination, and trust—conditions that markets alone often struggle to provide. Companies frequently do not know which nearby firms could use their waste streams, or how to structure viable exchanges.
Korea’s institutional architecture—led by the Korea National Cleaner Production Center (KNCPC), the Korea Industrial Complex Corporation (KICOX) and the Korea Energy Agency (KEA) along with Regional EIP centers working closely with private firms—was designed to solve these coordination challenges, identify opportunities, and facilitate partnerships.
The results have been significant. In Ulsan’s Mipo and Onsan industrial complex alone, a relatively modest public investment in industrial symbiosis business research and development project helped unlock substantial annual cost savings and new revenues for firms. Over time, as these projects proved commercially viable, the system became increasingly self-sustaining—driven by business incentives rather than public subsidy.
