Waste also presents an opportunity in a grander sense: as a potential resource.
The theme of the conference focuses on the new EU 2020 strategy for 2014-2020, the policy that will determine the way the main European funds are allocated - a key potential resource for European Historic Towns.
Energy Secretary Ed Davey said shale gas was a promising new potential energy resource for the UK. It might contribute significantly to energy security and substitute for imports which are increasing as North Sea gas is decreasing.
Perhaps more importantly, this resource potential is a hop, skip and a jump away from the mega-demand centers along the coastal regions of the East Coast.
In the wake of the first Gulf War, the U.S. Army assessed Saudi Arabia's solar energy resource potential in a classified effort to determine how oil fires had affected the region.
Nobody doubts the resource potential they all hold, but turning that into money needs major capital and technological skills, most of which sits with international oil companies rather than national entities farming out work to service companies on the cheap.
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The networks of employees provide a vast resource of potential recruits, says Chris Merritt, vice president of sales at BranchOut.
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Money from the grant will also be used to investigate the potential for an archaeological resource centre on North Uist.
However, if we are to unleash this huge, untapped resource of human potential, akin to a giant Genie in a bottle, the single most powerful and far-reaching tool is to improve the performance of leaders.
While this mixup was easy to isolate and understand, it highlights an ongoing issue in the natural gas industry, that has become more and more important as the nation evaluates the unprecedented strategic potential of this domestic energy resource: Everyone seems to estimate and report the gas resource, and even production, a little bit differently.
By splitting the businesses, Netflix can prevent the DVD business from dragging on the growth potential of streaming in terms of resource allocation.
Contrary to the dire reports from the press, this indicates the potential for tremendous growth in the resource base and that the Marcellus contains enough gas to satisfy U.S. demand (roughly 27 tcf per year) for 15 years.
West Africa is persistently volatile, as the latest dustups in the Ivory Coast and continuing mayhem in Congo show, but Nigeria rises above resource-rich neighbors in its potential to affect world commerce.
We believe that business leaders can unleash tremendous untapped potential by unshackling their people and their businesses from resource constraints (while still, of course, holding them accountable for results).
To put it another way, Italy's potential financing requirements on its own would exhaust the resource of the EFSF, based on its current size, if investors were to shun Italy altogether.
Campaign groups agree that it is better to use offcuts as a resource rather than let them rot, but the potential scale of the enterprise alarms them as they believe in future power generators will be scouring the globe for stuff to put in the furnace.
But given its potential, the race is on to figure out how to safely exploit this resource.
"The consortium see the mouse genome as the sort of basic, pre-competitive resource that should be available to all scientists, without restriction, in order to assure that the potential of the human genome is realised as rapidly as possible, " a spokesperson told BBC News Online.
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