Just as the province declares clean water technology a priority, one local plant in the industry is shutting its doors.

Operations at the Burlington plant of what was once known as Zenon Environmental Inc. will cease by year's end as it ships operations from there to Hungary.

In Monday's throne speech, the province announced a new Water Opportunities Act designed to take advantage of Ontario's expertise in clean-water technology, a growing industry worth $400 billion annually.

Now called GE Water and Process Technologies after being acquired in 2006 by GE Canada, the Zenon business began in the Hess Street home of McMaster University professor Andrew Benedek.

The Burlington plant, between Burloak Drive and Appleby Line north of Highway 403, manufactures the ZeeWeed line which is a spaghetti-like membrane that filters bacteria and other contaminants out of water and wastewater.

The company announced last week that approximately 45 employees at the facility will be affected.

"They will all be offered other opportunities in the GE family," said Kim Warburton, spokesperson for GE Canada.

GE Canada has 8,000 employees in offices across the country and corporate headquarters in Mississauga. Its water business sites are in Oakville, Edmonton and Guelph.

Employees will also be offered jobs in GE Power and Water, which has operations around the world.

Warburton said the move to close the Burlington plant will see ZeeWeed operations move to the company's plant in Oroszlany, Hungary, and bring all ZeeWeed manufacturing under one roof.

"It's a way that we can continue to build efficiencies into our business operations in water. It made sense to do this, to put things under one roof," Warburton said.

"It allows us to run our business more efficiently.

"Demand for the product is lower than we would like so we have seen a bit of a decline," she added. She attributes it to the slowdown in the economy and more competition in the market.

Under the Zenon name, it was known as one of the world's most successful water filtration companies. It was founded in 1980 when Benedek, a former Mac chemistry professor, developed technology to filter water using hollow-fibre membranes.

It grew to have plants in Oakville, Burlington and Hungary with 1,400 employees before the purchase by GE.

General Electric purchased Zenon for $763 million. GE began eyeing Zenon after it closed 2005 with a net loss of $8.4 million.

In 2005, then chairman and CEO Benedek, said the company's biggest setback in 10 years was when it set out to retrofit its Burlington membrane production plant to manufacture an updated version of its ZeeWeed product. Production on an earlier version was stopped in the interim.

The changeover was expected to take only a couple of weeks but that turned into four months and neither version could be produced.

That year, Zenon reported a third-quarter loss of more than $4.7 million. The 283 per cent decline was from a profit of more than $2.5 million for the same period last year.

When asked if the closure was a result of a decline from the earlier setback, Warburton said company policy doesn't allow her to report financial data for specific GE companies.

rdelazzer@thespec.com

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