The Manufacturing ENVIRONMENTAL Conference
Petrolheads and ecowarriors declare peace.
Petrolheads and ecowarriors, hard-nosed tycoons and tree-huggers can all live in peace.
The idea that the business economics and care for the environment are mutually exclusive concepts was heartily trounced at the neatly and appropriately dubbed ‘eco-nomically friendly’ Manufacturing Environmental Conference at Norfolk’s Ecotech Centre.
Delegates attracted to the Swaffham conference - the location for Stephen Fry’s Sunday night TV hit Kingdom – heard Group Lotus executive Matthew Jones insist there need be nothing inconsistent between a liking for fast cars and taking care of the environment.
From founder Colin Chapman’s day on, Lotus’ ethos had always been that speed could be derived from lightness rather than power, he said. Jones then produced some impressive power-weight-speed comparisons with the likes of BMW, Porsche and Nissan to prove it before going on to reveal plans to install three wind turbines at its factory near the market town of Wymondham. If planning permission is granted, they will make the car plant self-sufficient for power, feed the national grid and save 15,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.
A presentation from Andy Vaughan, group environmental affairs manager at the Japanese-owned medical equipment manufacturer Olympus Keymed, went on to demonstrate the virtues of its brand new facility in Southend. There, heat pumps buried deep beneath the site, sophisticated waste separation systems, a water gathering and re-circulation scheme, and a Japan-set target to reduce the waste that goes to landfill to less than one per cent by 2010, were all a part of an exemplary 21st century enterprise.
Also presenting to the conference were Dr David Calvert, who described his bridging role between Hull University’s Environmental Technologies Centre of Industrial Collaboration and local industry as that of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s infamous inter-planetary language translator, the babel-fish.
Norfolk County Council business co-ordinator Simon Best rounded off the conference with an explanation of the region’s Eastex scheme, which works on the basis that one company’s waste can be another’s raw material.