Characterization of national eco-industrial park projects in China, Korea, and Japan: Bibliometric analysis and systematic literature review

Eco-industrial parks (EIPs) promote sustainable industrial development by integrating environmental, economic, and social objectives. China, Japan, and Korea have reported significant achievements on EIPs. This paper conducted an integrated bibliometric analysis and systematic literatures review to characterize their national EIP initiatives and draw out their success factors. The bibliometric analysis was conducted on EIP research articles from 1998 to 2022, with keywords related to locally specified EIPs plus the country name. Three hundred and sixty-one peer-reviewed articles (China: 300; Korea: 30; and Japan: 31) are analyzed. Keywords analysis highlighted “environmental benefit,” “carbon emission,” and “eco-industrial development” for China; “symbiosis,” “society,” and “recycling industry” for Japan; and “symbiosis network,” “emission,” and “eco-industrial parks” for Korea. These results well match with the fact that China's EIP was featured as establishing centralized industrial infrastructure facilitated by circular economy and environmental policies. Korean EIP focused on building industrial symbiosis (IS) networks by business model, emphasizing EIP transition. Eco-town program in Japan emphasized waste recycling and landfill minimization to promote eco-innovation with environmental technology advancement. The in-depth literature review of these EIP programs based on the evolution, planning, implementation, and evaluation presents the specific characteristics of the EIP program in each country. All the programs are incorporated into national policy and development strategy with specific financial support and incentives for project incubation, enabling scheme and business model for project scale up, as well as collaborative government (central and local) and public–private partnership in their contexts. These lessons are expected to be customized based on the target countries’ situations to scale up and mainstream EIP implementation globally. © 2024 by the International Society for Industrial Ecology.