By: Albert Sole, Senior Private Sector Specialist, World Bank
There is a question that haunts every conversation about green industrialization in developing countries: does going green mean sacrificing growth?On May 6-8 2026, a study trip to South Korea with a Rwandan delegation offered a compelling, data-backed answer — and it is not the one pessimists would expect.
The delegation — drawn from Rwanda's Ministry of Trade and Industry (MINICOM), the Rwanda Development Board (RDB), the Rwanda Green Fund, and the Centre for Promotion of Clean Industries and Circular Economy (CPCIC) — spent time in Ulsan, Korea's industrial capital, engaging with institutions at the heart of Korea's Eco-Industrial Park (EIP) program: KEITI, KECO, KICOX, NIGT, and KIND. What we found was not a green showcase built at the expense of competitiveness. It was the opposite. Korea has sustained its manufacturing because of its circular economy approach, not in spite it.
When Waste Becomes a Competitive Advantage
The premise of Korea's EIP model is deceptively simple: one factory's waste is another factory's raw material. This concept — industrial symbiosis — turns what is typically a cost (waste disposal, energy bills, water procurement) into a source of revenue and savings. In Ulsan, we saw this logic at scale.
The Ulsan Mipo and Onsan industrial complex, spread across 6,540 hectares and hosting over 1,000 firms in sectors ranging from vehicle manufacturing to petrochemicals, became a pilot site for Korea's national EIP program in 2003. Over the following decade and a half, government investments of just US$14.8 million in industrial symbiosis research and development projects unlocked US$65 million per year in new business income from the sale of waste and by-products, and a further US$78 million per year in energy and material cost savings. Between 2005 and 2016, the program also reduced 665,712 tons of CO2 emissions and saved 79,357 tons of water — all while firms grew more profitable.
What made this possible was not just technology. It was governance. Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE) set the policy direction; the Korea Industrial Complex Corporation (KICOX) managed implementation; regional EIP centers — led by advisory boards of local government, academia, and industry — identified potential projects, supported implementation and monitored results.
The Real Lesson: Green Is Good for the Bottom Line
The single insight that I believe will stay with the Rwandan delegation longest is this: Korea's industrial symbiosis model did not simply reduce pollution. It prevented the offshoring of manufacturing. As energy and resource costs rose, Korean firms in traditional heavy industries faced pressure to relocate production. Industrial symbiosis — by dramatically lowering input costs through shared infrastructure and by turning waste streams into revenue — made staying in Korea the more profitable choice.
As the World Bank's 2021 report Circular Economy in Industrial Parks: Technologies for Competitiveness puts it, circular economy interventions "are not just environmentally beneficial but also economically viable and hence, can improve the competitiveness of industrial parks and tenant firms." Korea proves this is not a theoretical proposition. It is a business reality, documented in firm-level accounts across two decades of implementation.
This framing matters enormously for Rwanda's industrial strategy. Rwanda's industrial parks — including the Kigali Special Economic Zone and parks in Bugesera, Huye, Rusizi, and beyond — face real challenges: high energy costs, import-dependent inputs, and the need to attract and retain investment in a competitive regional landscape. EIP principles, applied smartly, can address all three. Shared energy infrastructure lowers costs for SMEs that cannot afford green technology individually. Industrial symbiosis reduces reliance on imported raw materials by recirculating what is already in the park. And a credible EIP certification — under the International Framework for EIPs developed jointly by UNIDO, the World Bank, and GIZ — strengthens Rwanda's positioning as a sustainable investment destination.
Three Priorities for the Path Ahead
Based on what the delegation observed and discussed in Ulsan and with Korea's key institutions, three priorities stand out for Rwanda's EIP journey:
Start with the business case. Every industrial symbiosis project in Ulsan began with a feasibility study that demonstrated profitability for participating firms. Rwanda's CPCIC and RDB should prioritize building this analytical capacity — identifying concrete symbiosis opportunities in existing parks and modeling the financial returns before proposing any infrastructure investment.
Sequence regulation alongside investment. A recurring barrier in many countries is that legal frameworks classify industrial by-products as "waste," making them difficult to trade or reuse even when the technology exists. Korea's experience shows that regulatory reform — enabling firms to legally exchange by-products and access green credentials — is as important as any physical infrastructure.
Build on existing Korean partnerships. Korea has a long and generous history of sharing its industrial development experience through programs like the Korea-World Bank Partnership Facility (KWPF), which financed the 2021 report on circular economy technologies. This study trip itself is part of that tradition. Rwanda should formalize the bilateral relationships initiated in Ulsan into concrete technical assistance programs — with KICOX and KEITI in particular — to support the design of Rwanda's first EIP pilots.
A Shared Ambition
Walking through the Ulsan industrial complex — seeing the pipelines that carry steam from a waste-to-energy incinerator to chemical plants a kilometer away, hearing how a US$5 million public investment in pipeline infrastructure generated US$3 million a year in new revenue for the city and US$3.7 million in fuel savings for a private company — it is hard not to feel that this model's time has come for Africa.
Rwanda is not starting from zero. It has parks, it has policy, and it now has firsthand knowledge of what a mature EIP ecosystem looks like in practice. The Korean model did not happen overnight, and Rwanda's will not either. But if the lesson from Korea is that going green and staying competitive are the same thing — not trade-offs — then the case for acting now is compelling.
The Rwandan delegation returned home not with a blueprint to copy, but with a mindset to adopt: waste is a resource, symbiosis is a strategy, and sustainability is a source of competitive advantage.