L’ancien site Opel devient un zoning industriel du futur avec un laboratoire d’expérimentation pour l’innovation et l’économie circulaire

The former Opel site, also known as the Churchill Industrial Zone, occupies approximately 88 ha (equivalent to 110 soccer pitches) and is one of the last available large sites at the Port of Antwerp-Bruges. The zone has multimodal access and is near Europe's largest integrated petrochemical cluster, enabling interaction with existing companies and suppliers. Port of Antwerp-Bruges wants to use this strategic zone in the transition to a sustainable circular economy and provide opportunities to small innovative startups.

Port of Antwerp-Bruges attaches great importance to innovation, energy transition and employment, and is looking specifically for companies that share this vision and which will strengthen the cluster. To attract the right companies to do this, Arcadis has studied the set-up conditions that companies must meet and how collaboration between them can be maximized. We have also considered what utility infrastructure is needed and how we can best integrate it into the redevelopment plan.

Arcadis sees ports as hubs for the circular economy. The waste produced by company A could be the raw materials needed by company B. In this sense, the ideal scenario would be that they already collaborate as part of a port community and have a vast and varied industrial estate at their disposal. In this case, innovation through industrial interaction would not be limited to exchanging waste and materials, but could also include other utilities, such as steam, energy, heat and gray water.