It is the purpose of this thesis to develop a practical guide to identify, prioritise and exploit potentials in industrial waste by using a systematic procedure. An essential part of this study focuses therefore on an overview about industrial companies, modern waste management and future trends. Moreover waste specific criteria and ques-tions to stimulate new ideas are developed (reduce before reuse before recycle before other recovery before disposal) to support finding intelligent ways of using waste and to achieve a relatively high rate of use. The results show that the developed zero waste approach allows identifying, prioritizing and evaluating potentials in industrial waste with its systematic proce-dure. The applicability of this developed tool for a company in the industrial sector was tested in the practical part of this thesis and shows a successful usage. It is recommended using this zero waste approach for further examples of application to improve the practical usage even more and to do eventual needed adaptions.