Dr. Lesley Cormack is Principal and Deputy Vice-Chancellor of UBC’s Okanagan campus in Kelowna
KELOWNA – The Government of Canada is supporting BC companies initiatives that lower their environmental footprint while creating jobs.
The Federal Government announced $1.04 million in funding to the University of British Columbia‘s Okanagan campus (UBCO) to help local businesses implement cutting-edge circular economy practices.
In a circular economy, nothing is waste. The circular economy retains and recovers as much value as possible from resources by reusing, repairing, refurbishing, remanufacturing, repurposing, or recycling products and materials. It’s about using valuable resources wisely, thinking about waste as a resource instead of a cost, and finding innovative ways to better the environment and the economy.
With this PacifiCan funding, UBCO will connect local businesses with the engineering expertise needed to save industrial materials from landfill, while designing new green products from fully bio-sourced materials. UBCO will also buy new equipment and expand its advanced materials and manufacturing testing capabilities so that more companies can access this support. Technical knowledge developed through these projects will be saved in a digital repository to help current and future companies embrace the circular economy.
The combination of in-person expertise and a digital repository supporting a circular economy is the first-of-its-kind in the province and will build on BC’s leadership in clean technology. It will also raise the profile of local companies and innovators who are creating solutions with global impact.
The announcement was made while celebrating the launch of UBCO’s Clean Tech Hub, an innovation space that received $1.9M from PacifiCan in 2021. This investment is helping UBCO catalyze academic-industry collaborations that help Canadian companies bring their technologies and products to domestic and international markets.
“UBC Okanagan researchers are creating leading-edge solutions for the complex challenges faced here in the BC Interior and around the world, such as how to reduce waste and create new value from existing materials. We are proud of the ground-breaking work being done on our campus and with our partners to create novel solutions that benefit both the environment and the economy. I am grateful for the Government of Canada’s ongoing support for this research project and the UBCO Clean Tech Hub,” said Dr. Lesley Cormack, Principal and Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus.
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