Funding Available for Sustainable Training in the Victorian Fibre and Textile Industry

The International Fibre Centre (IFC) has recognised that sustainability issues are becoming an increasingly important consideration for the Victorian textile industry with significant implications for longer-term viability and global competitiveness.  The Victorian textile and fibre industry has been hard hit by the global economic downturn with delays and cancelling of contracts from trading partners translating into plant closures and job losses.  In addition, the combined spectre of climate change, peak oil and an increasing regulatory environment for carbon accounting are increasingly impacting on the industry.  The 'lean and green' approach is the right model at the right time and will build innovative and competitive capacity in response to the global economic and environmental challenges.

Sustainable practices focus on minimising the use of energy and material resources and the reduction of discharge of pollutants as well as reputation enhancement, staff satisfaction, risk management and business ethics.  These are consistent with many of the aims of competitive manufacturing which reflect the financial management imperatives of taking whatever enterprise actions are possible to minimise costs.  The underpinning rationale of this Victorian training scheme will be to draw on the synergies between good environmental performance and competitive manufacturing approaches.

This sustainable and competitive manufacturing enterprise training framework developed by the National Centre for Sustainability (NCS) at Swinburne has a number of key features:

• it is designed to be enterprise-based
• respond to industry economic and sustainable needs
• fast track the training plans and delivery of training to enterprises and
• allow for a range of participants to engage in training projects in industry from a range of starting points.

This training model encourages RTOs to partner with an enterprise to deliver training with a 'lean to green' approach which will align with the enterprise needs and benefit the enterprise involved in the training.  For further information, please refer to Swinburne University website.