Avove to Deliver Circular Economy Sprint as part of NWG’s Innovation Festival
Avove thrilled to be official sponsor and delivering circular economy sprint at the NWG Innovation Festival
The countdown to Northumbrian Water Group’s highly anticipated Innovation Festival is underway, and this year, we are thrilled be an official sponsor, partnering with Costain to deliver our very own sprint entitled Circular Economy.
What is the Innovation Festival?
Innovators from across the country will head to Newcastle Racecourse to tackle some of the water industry’s biggest challenges. This year, ‘regeneration’ is the festival’s key theme, with guests channelling their can-do spirit to find new ways of delivering sustainable results for water networks and communities.
Each year, the festival facilitates a detailed exploration of industry challenges and invites guests to consider wider environmental issues, with a view to addressing them collaboratively. As such, the festival attracts a wide range of experts from the water industry and beyond, with guests spanning the tech, energy and renewables, government, healthcare and communications sectors.
A key feature of the festival’s programme is its bespoke workshops, otherwise known as sprints, which focus on a variety of unique challenges, each with its own purpose and outcomes. There are also ‘hacks’, which focus on tech-based challenges, and daily dashes, which are rapid style versions of the sprints that take place within a day.
With networking and exhibition opportunities spread across the four-day event, there really is something for everyone, and we’re very excited to be sponsoring this year’s celebrations!
What is the Circular Economy sprint?
In partnership with Costain, our Circular Economy sprint asks one key question: how might we embed circular economy principles into AMP8 & 9 to deliver affordable, sustainable infrastructure, turning waste into value while reducing our reliance on finite resources? It might sound like a lot to digest, but we’re confident that our collaborative approach will help us uncover some of the answers.
So, what will we do, and how will we do it? By bringing together internal teams, LWE partners, engineers, sustainability leads and circular economy specialists, we will:
- Identify high-volume, high-impact waste materials from NWG projects and sites
- Map reuse and repurposing opportunities across live and planned workstreams
- Explore how LWE partners can enable circular thinking in design and delivery
- Develop interventions and toolkits to support tracking, handling and reapplication of materials
- Build a business-wide case for scaling circular reuse across the AMP8 portfolio
All this will be achieved through a variety of tasks and means, from flow mapping current site-level waste and surplus outputs to use case sprints and circular design labs with LWE and capital delivery partners. We’ll be breaking down barriers at every turn, hosting logistics and compliance workshops to bring it all together, with collaborative planning used to establish circular opportunities across teams and projects.
We’re in for an action-packed four days of innovation, but by the end of it, we hope to have unlocked a wide range of benefits that will help our teams, leads, partners and communities.
Book your place and become a part of our sprint
This inclusive event is an opportunity for our teams to network and collaborate in a relaxed and engaging setting. Register now and choose the Circular Economy sprint to be a part of the conversation.