Waste CRC boss warns on revenue expectations

Some Cooperative Research Centres (CRCs) could struggle to meet their seven-year revenue projections, the annual CRC Association conference in Sydney has been told.

Waste Management CRC chief executive officer Dr David Garman said his CRC had reached "crisis point" and its revenue target for the year was half of its expected value.

"It's difficult to project rates of commercialisation and rates of revenue production for these types of high-risk projects," he said.

"There aren't many industries where you can predict your revenue stream base starting from seven years out."

Designing bugs to keep the environment clean has not been a profitable business so far for the Waste Management CRC. Garman said two of its new spin-off companies had to be sold off to more raise capital and to reduce the management load that would distract the CRC from its main purpose.

He said he expected that revenues should flow into the CRC in the next few years after it receive a $20 million investment from listed company Zeolite for commercialisation of eight of its technologies.

"The technologies, ranging in value from $15,000 to several million dollars, are all on the cusp of commercialisation and will be on the market within a few years," Garman said.

"We plan to contract CSL to do large-scale production of designer bacteria."

The designer bugs will be used to deal with specific wastes - one group of bugs, for example, will process agricultural wastes and the other will purify water.

He said the designer bacteria could also be tailored to produce specialist chemicals from waste. One novel waste chemical product is a bio-pharmaceutical precursor that could be useful to the pharmaceutical industry.

"It is no longer hit and miss," Garman said. "These are production bacteria that have specific purposes."

He said current bacterial mixes used in large-scale bioreactors were not sustainable for more than a week, but the designer bacteria would be able to process waste far more efficiently.

"It needs to be robust," he said. "We are trying to work out how to make a stable microbial ecosystem that will process up to 100,000 tonnes of urban and industrial." In the end, he said, most of the revenue for the technologies would come from offshore. For every technology sold in Australia there were 40 sold overseas, he said.

"There aren't many industries where you can predict your revenue stream base starting from seven years out," he told Australian Biotechnology News.

"It is a common issue in the CRCs," he said. Some CRCs cease to exist, others become new CRCs and request a further $10 to $15 million from the Commonwealth government, while others allow their commercialised entities to bring in revenue to support R&D.