In the Netherlands 2 million tons organic bio-waste is not fully sorted and ends up burned or landfilled. This process is unnecessarily harming the health of people, animals and our planet every year. With our waste quantities only increasing, this is an important topic on the European agenda.

The creation of user-driven, self-organising, and decentralized networks is supported to make better use of the remaining value in bio-waste. The behaviour of people in these networks is critical for its environmental impact and long-term survival. This research proposes a quantitative set-up to increase the bio-waste separation rate of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). To research the potential environmental benefit in a symbiotic network for bio-waste separation the following research question was posed:

What is the influence of different groups of human behaviour and policy interventions in the development of bio-waste sortation networks for environmental benefit in symbiosis?

The Value-Belief-Norm theory is a social theory that is based on the altruistic intentions that drives people to behave in the interest of the planet, rather than their own benefit. The set-up offers a new approach to combine the Value-Belief-Norm theory with Industrial Symbiosis. This approach is applied in an agent-based simulation model and case study of the NDSM wharf Amsterdam.