The nine businesses and manufacturing success stories included Native Secrets, Kitchen Concepts, Ben Furney Flour Mills, Whylandra Waste and Recycling Centre and Regional EnviroScience. 

Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre director Michael Sharpe and University of NSW director of Sustainable Materials Research and Technology (SMaRT) said the nine organisations were success stories.

At the Waste and Recycling Centre, they discussed recycling and green manufacturing opportunities for the region. 

Mr Sharpe said it was great to tour the successful businesses in Dubbo.

“It’s really good to see great work happening here, manufacturing is on the up and up,” Mr Sharpe said. 

He said these sustainable ventures were the future of the manufacturing industry.

“The transformation in the industry is all around research, robotics welding and how that can help their manufacturing processes out to the waste recycling technologies,” Mr Sharpe said. 

He said Ben Furney Mills were looking to see how they could use their waste streams to make new products.

“They’re willing to back themselves and do the research.” 

Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre has 400 member companies which use a collaborative model. 

“We’ve got the research to match that now with some of the worlds best researchers. It’s about collaboration,” Mr Sharpe said. 

“Certainly innovation is key, I’ve seen that in every business I’ve been too.”

Professor Sahajwalla said the tour of the region had been “inspiring”. 

“It was really good to see the enormous passion and drive people to have at the individual level,” Professor Sahajwalla said. 

“With EnviroScience, the team there were very much interested in micro-factory solutions.

“Collaboration is key, this is a way for us to offer some solutions, it’s a win-win outcome.” 

Regional EnviroScience director Juliet Duffy said the partnership was promising. 

“We’ve been developing a product for the contamination industry for containment of materials,” Ms Duffy said.  

She said they were looking at how to produce using material remnants.

“So the clothing industry basically, we’re looking at that as a waste industry and turning it into a product that can contain waste materials,” she said. 

Regional EnviroScience project manager Ashleigh Gesler said micro-factories were the latest technology in recycling, “like a compact factory with a customised production line.”

“If a client needs a specific requirement because it’s technology-based, we should be able to produce that requirement, you order as per the client,” Ms Duffy said. 

Ms Duffy said the advantage for Dubbo was that it could be regionally based.

“We think Dubbo is really good from a logistics point of view,” Ms Duffy said.