Smart Regions speaks to the head of one of Europe's leading schools for bio based technology and innovation.
Smart Regions speaks to the head of one of Europe's leading schools for bio based innovation.
The city of Terneuzen in the Netherlands is home to the Bio Base Europe Training Center, one of Europe’s top institutions for bio based research and innovation. It seeks to train the future technicians and operators who will work in the EU's growing bio based sector.
Smart Regions spoke to Director, Jean Paul Leenknegt, about the centre's goals and its links to the Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant based in Belgium, a facility which seeks to scale up production of bio based products.
"Our cooperation with Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant originates from 2008. At that time, a cross-border project was on the drawing table and that was to stimulate the bio based economy in the Canal Zone region between Terneuzen in the Netherlands and Ghent in Belgium," Leenknegt explains.
"We receive students and pupils of schools and we have a programme with a workshop and presentations about the bio based economy and currently we expanded that to sustainability and circular economy as such. For training purposes we have a lot of process operators and maintenance technicians from local industry in the province of Zealand who were trained their certificates, their complacency in our premises and we have about 7000 trainees from those industries a year," he added.