Workshop is oversubscribed

OVER forty delegates from local businesses attended a workshop at Seagate to look into making savings by sharing resources.

The business delegates, mostly from the North West, discussed sharing resources from fish waste to fire fighting foam.

The workshop came as part of the National Industrial Symbiosis Programme in Northern Ireland at their recent 15th workshop at Seagate Technology, Londonderry. NISP is a free business opportunity programme supported by Invest Northern Ireland with funding from the European Regional Development Fund, under the European Sustainable Competitiveness Programme for Northern Ireland.

Dr Brian Burns, Vice President, Springtown Operations at Seagate welcomed delegates at the first NISP event to be hosted by a NISP member company. The event was oversubscribed, demonstrating the growing interest in industrial symbiosis.

The highlight of the day was the synergy workshop where delegates discussed resource "haves" and "wants" with the aim of generating cost savings and resource efficiencies to the companies involved.

139 synergy opportunities were identified on the day which offers potential cost savings of 11m with the diversion of 142,000 tonnes from landfill.

All of these opportunities will be followed up over the coming weeks when NISP practitioners will be available to talk with companies to see if these synergies can be progressed through to real savings.

Olive Hill, Director of Technology and Process Development, at Invest NI said: "The NISP programme offers businesses simple and yet highly effective ways to generate savings. It is encouraging to see the high level of interest from business leaders seeking the resources and opportunities to increase their productivity levels and profitability."

Using its network of businesses, NISP is able to identify mutually profitable transactions between companies so that previously underused resources such as materials, energy and water from one can be recovered, reprocessed and reused by others.

NISP has brought 14 million in financial benefit to local businesses while diverting 125,000 tonnes from landfill and eliminating 220,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.

NISP's next workshop is being held on Tuesday 29th June 2010 at Sandvik Mining & Construction, Ballygawley, Co Tyrone.