The Journal – Newcastle

A supplier of frozen marine worms form the North-East was just one of the recipients of yesterday’s royal business awards.
Seabait Limited, based in Northumberland, won both the international trade and sustainable development award for its provision of frozen marine worms for use as aquaculture feed.
Award organisers described the creatures as: “a genuinely innovative product, competing with unregulated collection of wild worms.”
Other winning companies from this region were Dupont Teijin Films UK in Middlesbrough, Tracerco in Billingham and Uniquema in Redcar.
Engineering giant Amec, which employs more than 1,200 people in the North-East, was also given an international trade award in recognition of its outstanding performance – principally in the oil, gas and processing industries – over the last three years.
But it was sea worm company Seabait, which is based at Alcan Pwer Station in Ashington, which won two awards at the UK’s top business awards.
Graham Rutherford, managing director of Seabait, said: “This is tremendous news and a major boost, not only for everyone at Seabait, but for the region as a whole.
“It is testimony to the hard work and efforts of everyone involved. To have been presented with one award would have been flattering enough but to have received two is just fantastic.”
The awards recognised the company for its achievements in both the international trade and sustainable development categories.
Exports at the company, which operates in the world’s first temperate, marine worm farm utilising heat energy from the nearby power station, have more than trebled over the past three years and now represent a massive 54pc of sales.
The annual awards were split into three categories – international trade, sustainable development and innovation.
ICI scooped its 70th Queen’s award for the environmentally friendly technology which reduces ozone-depleting emissions in refrigeration systems.
Winning the sustainability award, ICI’s Uniquema in Billingham has developed a synthetic lubricant called Emkarate.
It is used in conjunction with a hydrofluoro-carbon (HFC) refrigerant which does not release harmful chemicals into the atmosphere during the fridge-cooling process.
Leonard Berlik, chief executive of Uniquema, said business was now not only responsible for generating economic prosperity, but should also contribute to the safe keeping of the environment.
He said: “Our line of synthetic lubricants is an example of how vision and technology can create solutions that help the manufacturing industries of the world at the same time as they contribute to products that improve people’s quality of life.”
A total of 123 companies were declared winners of The Queen’s Award for Enterprise 2003.

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