This week we welcomed two missions, one of Brazilian industrialists seeking to green their processes, the other of Dutch manufacturers looking for new high value products to make.
Brazil’s economy is expanding fast, as their land and water reserves enable them to feed wealthier Chinese and organically conscious Europeans. They are running ever larger industrial processes which generate waste. Some of our visitors run large ethanol plants in Goias, in which 70% of the sugar cane biomass is simply recycled to the fields. Others run the sewage treatment for São Paulo, the industrial heartland, and for Fortaleza, historically a desert but now a centre for wind and solar power. Many are qualified industrial chemists, well able to assess the technologists we presented in collaboration with InCrops, IATC and UKTI. Local companies including Hycagen, whose enzymes can make biodiesel in which the one third of the liquid normally discarded is kept miscible and is used; Greentide, whose run of river generators produce local electricity but also aerate the river; Clearfleau, whose small AD plants reduce the energy bill for dairies and other small plants 60% and allow local recycling of water. Some collaborations were already brewing as they went on to visit the Carbon Trust incubator at TTP and to attend a conference on AD in Birmingham.
Holland is finding a role designing and marketing goods now increasingly manufactured in Asia. Philips, once the employer of 100,000 in Eindhoven, now only employs 9,000 there. Their spinouts, including ASML and FEI, along with other local OEMs like DAF Trucks, now sustain a local ecosystem of 320 first, second and third tier suppliers. They are good at making new machines in small volumes with high mix and high complexity, which they can export to other parts of the world. They would like more proven concepts that they can help the world to manufacture. For example, the CD was originally developed as a piece of contract research in Cambridge, replacing expensive inks with surface holes that absorb light because of the nanostructure of their machined surface. But the machines that make small scale production of CDs cheap were developed in Holland.
Unlike the World Cup match that put Holland through to play in the Final and sent Brazil disconsolately home, high technology is not a zero sum game. The platform technologies supported by local companies like ARM, CSR and Illumina allow plenty of space for other companies to develop and market finished products and services and take their share of the value. We’re lucky that our reputation for innovation gives us opportunities to help such diverse regions around the world.
Brazil’s economy is expanding fast, as their land and water reserves enable them to feed wealthier Chinese and organically conscious Europeans. They are running ever larger industrial processes which generate waste. Some of our visitors run large ethanol plants in Goias, in which 70% of the sugar cane biomass is simply recycled to the fields. Others run the sewage treatment for São Paulo, the industrial heartland, and for Fortaleza, historically a desert but now a centre for wind and solar power. Many are qualified industrial chemists, well able to assess the technologists we presented in collaboration with InCrops, IATC and UKTI. Local companies including Hycagen, whose enzymes can make biodiesel in which the one third of the liquid normally discarded is kept miscible and is used; Greentide, whose run of river generators produce local electricity but also aerate the river; Clearfleau, whose small AD plants reduce the energy bill for dairies and other small plants 60% and allow local recycling of water. Some collaborations were already brewing as they went on to visit the Carbon Trust incubator at TTP and to attend a conference on AD in Birmingham.
Holland is finding a role designing and marketing goods now increasingly manufactured in Asia. Philips, once the employer of 100,000 in Eindhoven, now only employs 9,000 there. Their spinouts, including ASML and FEI, along with other local OEMs like DAF Trucks, now sustain a local ecosystem of 320 first, second and third tier suppliers. They are good at making new machines in small volumes with high mix and high complexity, which they can export to other parts of the world. They would like more proven concepts that they can help the world to manufacture. For example, the CD was originally developed as a piece of contract research in Cambridge, replacing expensive inks with surface holes that absorb light because of the nanostructure of their machined surface. But the machines that make small scale production of CDs cheap were developed in Holland.
Unlike the World Cup match that put Holland through to play in the Final and sent Brazil disconsolately home, high technology is not a zero sum game. The platform technologies supported by local companies like ARM, CSR and Illumina allow plenty of space for other companies to develop and market finished products and services and take their share of the value. We’re lucky that our reputation for innovation gives us opportunities to help such diverse regions around the world.
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