This article is in Chemistry in Australia magazine: Issue June 2023
Author: Paulomi (Polly) Burey, Jessica Feldman, Hannah Seligmann, Eric Song, Matthew Flynn, Andreas Helwig Zahra Gharineiat, Dinuki Seneviratne, Eliza Whiteside, Tristan Shelley, Nils Priesler, Allan Manalo, Ali Mirzaghorbanali, Hadi Nourizadeh, Michael Roberts, Rose Nicol, Petrea Redmond, Mark Lynch, John Dearnaley, Kiyah De-Arne and Geoff Germon (Talon Technology)
Image: T4L dual-ring robotic braiding cell for making advanced fibre composite shapes. | Centre for Future Materials, University of Southern Queensland
Transitioning to ‘no waste’ can be a complex task, so University of Southern Queensland researchers at the SIMPLE hub and NO WASTE pilot precinct are aiming for simple design, processes and recovery to keep ‘waste’ out of landfill.
One of the advantages of working in a multidisciplinary team is that the combination of expertise can help accelerate tackling broad and complex problems such as how to prevent ‘waste’ material from having a detrimental environment impact. There is value in acknowledging that there is no such thing as waste, just a material that has not found a ‘home’ or follow-on use yet.
With ‘value’ being the key word, the current focus in the waste material research space has not only been on the technical approaches for transforming product manufacture, but has also been on their viability (e.g. financial and ease of implementation). This is because viability of the solution is key to uptake into common practice. In a circular economy, the ways in which we design how to construct and deconstruct products both physically and chemically so that they are re-usable, be it through recycling, remanufacture, repair or refurbishment.
With this purpose, our team, consisting of a wide variety of engineers, scientists, and education and business academics focuses on transforming product manufacture and supply chains to be sustainable. The industry sectors of focus for our work include the food, medical, construction, resource and energy sectors. At times, the collaboration of these industries is one strategy to prevent ‘waste’ from going to landfill. The technical approaches vary for each sector but focus on the development of processes that are not overly complicated, are potentially easy to implement and have low energy intensity. The other area of focus is design of products that are easy to construct and deconstruct, to make recovery of separate material streams easier as many products are what we might term ‘composite materials’.
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