The presentations aimed at both the strategies behind improving our nation's sustainability capacity and the emerging technologies that are being implemented to turn Ohio’s waste materials into profit. The   people and organizations represented at the conference were there to talk about how they use lower amounts of consumables; move partially used consumables to a next-tier user rather than move directly to the landfill; and extract or convert so-called waste materials into energy or re-purposed materials, again avoiding the landfill.

As a culture, Americans are huge per-capita consumers of literally everything. Many of the speakers drove home the message that such use patterns are just one piece of how our carbon footprint is impacted. Not as conspicuous, but clearly a large piece of the wasted resources situation, are the time, energy, and materials used by the supply chain to provide the consumables that tally up to several pounds per day of waste generated by every person in this country. Even less conspicuous, and ultimately more critical, is the effect such consumption habits have on the ecosystems and environment that cannot sustain such a consumption load.

Speakers demonstrated what their companies and organizations have already been doing to reduce their carbon footprint, to recycle, to use recycled materials, to move partially depleted resources to other users who can profitable extract or utilize such materials, and overall, to collaborate with other organizations through "by-product synergy" programs that significantly reduce the amounts of totally spent materials that are discarded or destroyed.

Many of the companies with very evolved by-product synergy programs have been at it for nearly a decade. They have evolved analysis tools, waste-to-energy technologies, recycling and by-product utilization programs, and active connections to other companies and organizations willing build by-product synergy opportunities. The audience of industry, commercial, and government experts heard many positive stories about economic growth and environmental footprint reduction and some cold, hard facts about the need for pursuing by-product synergy options.

By-product synergy is alive and well in Ohio. Opportunities, best practices, benefits, and barriers faced by the Ohio companies represented at the conference provide lessons-learned for many other companies and organizations in other states and around the world. Over the next few weeks, watch this web site for a series of reports on the speakers and their messages from this Waste to Profit conference.

The Center for Resilience is an interdisciplinary research center dedicated to improving the resilience of industrial systems and the environments in which they operate. In a nutshell, we believe that short-term risk management and long-term sustainability are two ends of the enterprise resilience continuum. To pursue our mission, we have joined forces with a powerful network of engineers, scientists, and business scholars at The Ohio State University and collaborating institutions, leveraging over $20 million in ongoing research programs.

The Ohio BioProduct Innovation Center is a Wright Center funded by Ohio Department of Development. OBIC focuses on enhancing Ohio’s leadership position in bioproduct commercialization. A novel market pull model integrates academia in support of comprehensive supply chain collaborations across agriculture, specialty chemical and polymer industry sectors.