Newfoundland and Labrador has a small population spread across vast areas of land. Its communities and industries are often found in rural and sometimes even remote areas. These circumstances make the provision of waste management services challenging. Processes and technologies that are proven elsewhere often are uneconomic in the NL context due to smaller scales of activity and volumes of waste.
Organics represent roughly a third of the province’s waste. While much of this material is sent to landfills, in many cases that organic waste has value. This project ran from 2022-24 and focused on exploring new uses for industrial organic waste streams, with objectives to: improve environmental outcomes via reduced landfilling; increase productivity for businesses by reducing their wastes; and create new business opportunities in NL where new value from waste can be achieved.
The project aimed to accelerate value from waste innovation in NL through strategic research, firm-level interventions, and sector-level initiatives.
Efforts to develop effective waste-to-value initiatives and enterprises for organics in NL have struggled to gain traction or become sustainable. Given the growing interest among multiple groups in pursuing these opportunities, econext partnered with The Harris Centre to engage in a cross-sectoral dialogue on the opportunities, challenges, strategies and policy implications for advancing the development of organic “waste-to-value” approaches and enterprises in the province. The forum was held on April 22, 2022 and informed in part by the research identified above. Other event partners included the NL Forestry Industry Association (NLFIA), the NL Aquaculture Industry Association (NAIA), the NL Federation of Agriculture (NLFA), the Canadian Centre for Fisheries Innovation (CCFI), and the Association of Seafood Producers.
Informed by the strategic research and forum, through the life of the project econext worked directly with over 20 SMEs and organizations in NL to help them identify value from waste opportunities, refine ideas and concepts, and develop project proposals to attract partners and funding. Some of the projects which econext helped to shape have advanced from concept to implementation, resulting in real waste management challenges being solved through local innovation.
Research was undertaken to identify industrial organic waste research, development, and innovation opportunities in forestry, aquaculture, fisheries, and agriculture on an Atlantic Canadian basis.
Through the life of the project, econext experimented with different approaches to support and stimulate value from waste initiatives in NL. These included:
Our newsletter is the #1 source of information on news, events, and projects relevant to Newfoundland and Labrador's clean growth priorities.
