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. econext aims to accelerate value from waste innovation in NL through strategic research, firm-level interventions, and sector-level initiatives 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 Zero econext Circular Economy Incubator is a free program to help entrepreneurs and businesses explore opportunities for innovative new approaches to waste management in Newfoundland and Labrador. Over the course of 6 months, participants will advance their ideas forward and benefit from entrepreneurial skill-building, circular economy expertise, ongoing business mentorship, and access to a network of like-minded organizations and leaders.
Working with industry leaders, econext identifies the most pressing challenges and most promising opportunities for clean growth in Newfoundland and Labrador. We advance education and awareness through discussion papers and strategic research.
Informed by strategic research, events, and its network of experts, since the project commenced in 2022 econext has worked directly with over 24 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.
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.
econext has experimented with different approaches to support and stimulate value from waste initiatives in NL. These have included:
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