Monthly Meeting December 2020

The December 2020 Monthly Meeting was held online on Wednesday 2nd December 2020, with over 75 members in attendance. This was the program for the evening:

Guest Speakers: Cameron McKenzie and Angela Stubbs
Topic: Empowering businesses to exchange waste as a resource – ASPIRE

ASPIRE is a digital tool that supports a social business network, across a region. As industries face the challenge of rising waste disposal costs and the pressure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from excessive landfill, it is neither cost-effective, operationally efficient nor socially responsible for companies to ignore the end of life impacts of unwanted resources.

Cameron McKenzie

Cameron McKenzie is the CEO of ASPIRE.

ASPIRE is an online platform and marketplace that helps drive innovation in the transition to a circular economy in Australia.

Cameron started his career in construction and was always bothered by the amount of waste that this industry creates. He has several trade skills under his belt including Engineering and Carpentry but has also studied to acquire a Masters Degree in Entrepreneurship & Innovation and holds an MBA.

He is the winner of the Fillion Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence and worked closely with CSIRO and Kingston Council during the transition phase of moving ASPIRE out of CSIRO and into a new entity and upgraded platform.

ASPIRE now has the independence to branch out beyond Victoria to be a national program and more recently, connecting to Hong Kong circular economy stakeholders.

Angela Stubbs

Angela has held a senior position in the City Economy & Innovation department at Kingston Council for the past 10 years. Business sustainability and industrial symbiosis are a focus for her work with businesses in the Kingston municipality, which has a large manufacturing base.

In 2014 she led a project team to establish a ‘proof of concept’ for an innovative online waste materials exchange register, now called ASPIRE.

The ASPIRE program was launched online in November 2016 and continues to expand locally, interstate, and more recently, globally. Cameron McKenzie has now taken over the entity of ASPIRE and is leading it forward with a circular economy approach.

Angela strives to bring companies from different industry sectors together to identify business opportunities that keep resources in the economy in a perpetual productive cycle that avoids waste and reduces business operating costs and supports the concept of The Circular Economy.

In 2020 she launched the Circular Advantage online business education program which is the focus of her presentation.

New meeting segment: iHelp Online

In a similar vein to the Q&A segment that ran for many years at Moorabbin face to face monthly meetings, a member of the iHelp team will join the meeting each month to answer your technical questions.

This month it is Harry Lewis.

You are invited to submit your questions to iHelp for responses during the meeting.  Please send your questions by email to: [email protected] to arrive by 6pm on Wednesday, 2 December.

Meeting Agenda

7.00pm sharp: Meeting opens. Host is Peter Bacon.

Guest speakers: Angela Stubbs, Cameron McKenzie.

Q & A with Stewart Gruneklee.

Social break.

President’s Report: David Stonier-Gibson.

What’s New? with George Skarbek (for the final time).

iHelp Online: Harry Lewis and iHelp Team.

9.00pm (approx): Close.

After the meeting: Informal iHelp discussion continued on an adhoc basis.

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If you missed out the first time and would like to view any of these presentations, you can do so at http://services.melbpc.org.au/videos/

The username is videos and the password is drum286.