UNSW’s Professor Veena Sahajwalla is one of Australia’s most dynamic academics who has been a champion of turning around our notion of waste into a resource that can “drive manufacturing, create jobs and support sustainability”. In a great alignment of focus with TFE’s Circular Disruption on 12 November, she delivered this speech to the National Press Club on Tuesday, where she brings this vastly underutilised resource to the national spotlight.
Following is a lightly edited transcript of her speech.
Waste is a resource that is waiting to be harvested.
Buried in discarded products are metals, polymers, and ceramics which could be remanufactured into new products.
But because waste is complex and contains mixed materials, many of these valuable resources are discarded.
It’s not considered economically viable to recycle many of them due to limitations of existing approaches.
True sustainability demands we harness this potential and transform waste into a resource stream for advanced manufacturing.
Instead of relegating waste to landfills, incinerators, or stockpiles, we must reimagine it as the cornerstone of a circular economy—one that drives innovation, supports local industries, creates jobs, and delivers environmental and social benefits.
Using our waste resources as feedstock develops a circular economy where supply chains are linked up and local jobs are created, with significant environmental and social benefits.
These systems can be rolled out anywhere there is a problem with waste—which is to say, everywhere.
So that’s what I want to talk to you about today.
I want to explain how valuable the materials that we send to landfill are, and how we can harness that value in a way that helps us get a handle on some of the crises facing our planet.
I want to sketch out what a future using these technologies looks like, a future in which communities can take responsibility for the waste they generate and profit in the process.
Then I want to explain how none of the technologies my team has created would have been possible without the stability and the backing of an institution like The University of New South Wales.
Ideas flood out of Australian campuses every day, but we often struggle to corral them out of the lab and into the real world where they can start to do some good.
If we’re serious about productivity, sustainability, and national resilience, we have to redesign how our universities turn discovery into delivery.
But first I’m going to tell you about some of the technologies my team has developed, and why I think they could upend the wasteful status quo that sees materials that changed the world, discarded for no good reason.
Using systems that are proven and scalable, we can take pretty-well anything people toss out and from it build products that people want, opening up opportunities for the kind of profit-making that benefits us all.
This is a story about productivity, about decentralisation, about jobs in regional areas, and about using cutting edge science to improve people’s lives and the natural world.
It’s a story which imagines an economy based on determining what our society needs most, then figuring out how to deliver it.
I want to show you what a circular economy looks like in practice, and how communities are already turning waste into opportunity.
E-WASTE and RenewIT
Ever wondered what happens to those big, boxy office printers when they reach the end of their lives?
A printer is terribly difficult to recycle; it’s got all sorts of different materials in it.
But we worked out a process to capture some of those materials, and at a factory in Lane Cove in Sydney a company called RenewIT is using our technology to remanufacture old printers and discarded e-waste, turning them into filament for 3D printers.
Once in that state you can turn it into whatever you want, and it remains endlessly recyclable.
These aren’t charities or “social enterprises”.
These are companies with rock-solid fundamentals, happy customers and investors.
They just happen to be doing something different which is doing a world of good.
There’s value for the rest of the community too, council saving money on its waste bill is always welcome, and we all get access to clean, Australian made and recycled products.
The possibilities don’t end with a single microfactorie.
4200 kilograms per month of plastics diverted away from landfill. That’s just one micro factorie line in Sydney and Renew IT has plans to increase scale by adding more micro factories.
How we create depends on what the materials and products are worth.
By the end of the year RenewIT will have three filament lines just in Sydney facility. Creating local jobs and encouraging knowledge application with PhD students also having the opportunity to work with RenewIT on building more micro factories throughout Australia and internationally.
STEM workshops – rolling out next year working with high school students to encourage them to engage more with science especially girls.
Having industry partners like Renew IT provides the opportunity to allow students to see real world applications of science.
Opportunities for students to be involved in micro factories and helps them use their imagination about how we can create impact.
Automotive waste, pit green steel and circular hydrogen
What about vehicle tyres?
We discard 50 million a year in Australia, a huge waste of valuable materials.
Now, from a chemist’s perspective, those tyres are basically just a solid form of hydrogen and carbon and 20 years ago it occurred to me I could solve several problems at once, so I started developing what I call green steel.
Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon, and to produce it you need a reducing agent, usually we use coal, but hydrogen works perfectly well.
Iron plus tyres is basically everything you need for steel.
I devised a method to take tyres, use the hydrogen inside them to turn iron oxide into its metallic form, and essentially use them as a resource for electric steelmaking furnaces.
Carbon locked in the tyres becomes part of the alloy, too.
It’s cheaper and less energy intensive than the current system—a win for the industry, for the community, and for the environment.
Green steel is not just a product; it’s a system which it relies on two facts I have been convinced of for my entire career:
- there is still value in the materials we toss out
- we can harness that value to benefit our communities
We only recycle about 15 per cent of the tyres we throw away because until now we haven’t been able to harness the value locked inside them.
But we can now, and the technology is being used to divert millions of tyres away from landfill in four countries every year.
And that’s just the start.
For example, if steel needs carbon atoms, why couldn’t you use waste coffee grounds to provide them?
Well, you can!
Most coffee waste isn’t composted, but we can still use it and make it work for us.
Most people are aware of the “three Rs” — reduce, reuse, and recycle — required for resource conservation.
But there’s a fourth that’s just as crucial: Reform.
If we can liberate value from waste resources, we can use them to feed our industries.
Our need for steel isn’t going away, but if we harness what we have in front of us then we can produce metals that are much more sustainable.
With that in mind I have designed different systems for capturing the value contained within different types of waste—e-waste, aluminium, and old clothes for example.
Let me give you an example of what I mean.
Recently a neighbour was chucking out a set of broken steel chairs and, looking at them on the side of the road and knowing that their next stop was probably landfill, I couldn’t help but feel devastated.
Without steel we wouldn’t have the modern world, and to see such a precious metal discarded like that is tough.
This amazing material is in no sense waste, but we are wasting it.
I don’t say this to have a go at my neighbour. It’s not their fault.
I think most of us probably wonder, when we take out the wheelie bin on a Sunday night, whether this is really the wisest or most sustainable system for dealing with all the stuff we no longer value.
It is the system though, and it’s a system which sees perfectly useful, valuable materials we’ve expended huge amounts of energy refining and shaping to suit our needs, simply thrown out.
And what we do with so called “waste steel” is just one challenge of many.
Jamestrong Packaging – circular aluminium
A circular model keeps industries, jobs and value here, using the resources that we have at hand to create high-quality products that we all want.
Take aluminium, which you might think is an easy one to recycle.
But if it’s got a plastic veneer, or maybe some glue on it or something, it becomes much harder and less efficient to recycle using traditional methods and so it often will go to landfill.
When you consider how massively carbon intensive smelting bauxite to produce aluminium is, this isn’t just wasteful, it’s insanity.
So, my lab worked out a way to disengage labels and plastic veneers on discarded aluminium objects and turn the perfectly good aluminium back into a form manufacturers can use, avoiding landfill entirely.
What if you could capture that material?
Well, you can.
Just last week, our friends at Jamestrong Packaging opened their new casting line at their factory in Taree on the mid north coast of New South Wales—a leading Australasian manufacturer of metal packaging for consumer brands.
They produce 100 million aerosol cans every year, and soon a growing portion of that will come from reclaimed materials, integrating our green aluminium microfactorie creating circular aluminium.
And our green aluminium slugs don’t have to be imported from Thailand, reshoring a key part of the supply chain in Australia for the first time in years.
There’s even talk of exporting some of those slugs to China, a huge win for the company and our microfactorie model.
There is value in our waste, if you know how to extract it.
If Jamestrong company chooses, they can always add another microfactorie and ramp up the amount of remanufactured aluminium they’re using.
Liverpool – green ceramics
What about old t-shirts? What about discarded office printers or chairs? What about shoes? What about toothbrushes or old suitcases? What about batteries?
Or in the case of Liverpool in Sydney’s southwest, turning mattresses into tiles.
A few years back, Liverpool council hired Tim Pasley to head up their circular economy department.
Tim was going through the council’s budget and was shocked to learn that Liverpool was spending a lot every year to get rid of discarded mattresses.
Residents in the council area discard thousands, tens of thousands of mattresses every year. Liverpool is not unique in that, I must stress.
Every council spends vast sums on dealing with waste, and mattresses are a big issue.
They’re a complicated, fiddly thing to recycle, and they take up a lot of space.
Many just get buried in a hole and forgotten about.
But Tim wasn’t satisfied with that and so set about searching for a solution.
He was talking to a resource recovery operator named Woody, who argued “I’ve always said we should just shred the bloody things, but no one listens to me.”
But Tim was listening.
He convinced council to buy an industrial shredder, which they’ve called Woody, and now they shred the 20,000 mattresses tossed out within the LGA every year.
They’re trying to ramp up to as many as 200,000 if they can get the mattresses.
That in itself is redefining what waste supply chains look like, upending a system that’s been in place for years.
A mattress is several things—plastic foam, cotton lining, steel springs—and Woody turns them into fluff.
But what to do with all that material?
Historically you would toss it out, it’s rubbish, it’s too expensive and complicated to get anything of value out of it, and virgin materials are much easier to work with.
But Australians demand high-quality products, which means our rubbish is high-quality too.
So, in my lab at UNSW in Sydney, in the basement, I developed a technique which takes that discarded textile fluff, mixes it with other waste products like broken glass and then transforms them into tiles.
We developed a product that is durable, light, has a low carbon footprint, and is made from more than 80 per cent reclaimed materials.
It’s a tile and does everything you’d expect from a tile.
It meets or exceeds Australian regulations, and you can use it anywhere you’d use a normal tile—floor tiles, kitchen back-splashes, council conference rooms.
It was made in what I call a “microfactorie”, and the whole operation would fit comfortably on half a tennis court.
It’s not recycling in the traditional sense, what we’re doing is re-manufacturing.
We’ve created here a circular solution where waste extraction and manufacturing work together to deliver high performance and quality products.
What we’re showing here is that if value creation from end of life products is factored in, then new supply chains can be developed, redefining how we make and then unmake and remake products.
The microfactorie is modular so if you want to produce more tiles you add another module, ramping production up and down with just a few switches.
We worked with Liverpool council to build one of these microfactories, which is now successfully producing green ceramics using a portion of the LGA’s waste resources.
It’s not energy intensive, it didn’t require huge capital outlays, and it helps the council save on one of its biggest budget line-items.
Liverpool council wants to commercialise this process, to sell the products to other councils and the public, earn a profit on behalf of ratepayers, as well as deal with more and more of their waste.
Tim has championed this project from day one.
At every step we needed to show that the microfactorie model works, that it can provide value for the community, and is a viable alternative to business as usual.
It’s been a long journey, and Liverpool deserves credit for doing what it’s done.
Pressure on government officials is immense, and the public is rarely sympathetic if its money is squandered.
This is what leadership looks like.
Liverpool council took the risk and now, after several years of slow building, they’re poised to see the benefit.
Their leadership means we know a huge amount now that we didn’t know before, which means we can begin to think seriously about a future where microfactories are no longer revolutionary but common.
So that’s the microfactorie model: small, decentralised.
That’s approaching a scale I think can give real value to communities.
But for microfactorie technology to make a dent in the waste challenge, we need to do more than just prove they work.
We need to build them.
So, in the next section of this address I’ll outline why we should build these microfactories, and what a future in which they are common might look like.
A vision for a sustainable future
Innovative transformations and solutions that deliver benefits for our people and planet
Modern cars give you a good sense of how tricky this challenge really is.
You’re not just dealing with one material, you’re potentially dealing with hundreds and many of those metals, polymers, and ceramics could be remanufactured into new products.
But many are not, because it’s too hard and too costly to get at them using existing approaches.
But to close the loop on a truly circular economy we need to understand how so-called “end-of-life” materials can be transformed into high-value resources for sustainable production.
That means a glass bottle doesn’t have to be recycled and become just another glass bottle.
And it means we don’t just import low grade stuff from overseas, run through it quickly then chuck it out when it breaks and the waste overseas at the end of its life.
That’s the current model.
And councils could get in on the action too, setting up their own microfactories.
Maybe each council has a few microfactories focused on different waste streams—one doing batteries, one doing mattresses and textiles, one harvesting and remanufacturing waste aluminium.
Or councils could team up with their neighbours, with council, taking responsibility for all the glass, council dealing with smartphones, and council focusing on plastics and matresses.
Sustainable communities and waste hub
If waste is difficult for cities to deal with, it’s even worse for Regional and remote communities.
They need local solutions for their waste issues, and with the federal government’s sustainable communities and waste hub we’re working to design them.
Through the sustainable communities and waste, we’re working with the Aboriginal community in Wellington near Dubbo, helping them build sustainable housing using our green tiling.
It’s a fantastic prototype, allowing us to incorporate community feedback from people who are actually using our product.
That’s the beauty of a microfactorie—
if you’re not relying on a huge corporation, you can just ask the supplier to change the mix if you don’t like the look or feel of a product.
The goal is to provide jobs in regional areas, a revenue stream for local businesses, and to divert waste from landfill in the process.
If we think about circular economies just in terms of waste then I think we’re missing the potential, because there’s value (economic potential and benefits for humanity and our planet) everywhere you look.
It looks like regional manufacturing jobs, it looks like organisations avoiding the costly, inefficient use of virgin materials, and it looks like helping solve an issue faced by every community on the planet.
These systems are small enough they can sidestep the big, costly inefficiencies that demand centralisation, and contain the whole process within one machine.
We can connect sectors laterally, creating new and localised supply chains and industries which offer economic and environmental benefits including new, skilled jobs.
In short, we can finally close the loop and connect waste with manufacturing.
We don’t have to rely on economies of scale, we can rely instead on economies of purpose and ask what does our society need, and how do we get it?
We think of people as passive consumers but that is not my experience.
What I’ve noted on this journey is that when you put solutions into the hands of people, they respond.
They’re excited by this technology, they’re enthusiastic about the product.
They want to be involved in making a positive difference.
And this product does that, it connects head and heart and makes the right choice the easy one.
But what’s holding us up is that it’s hard to show the value in an alternative, to prove that rethinking a system that works is worth the disruption.
These pathways require industries to adapt and embrace innovative technologies, and as we’ve seen from our friends in Liverpool and Taree and Lane Cove, the willingness is there.
What they need most before they can move is proof it works, and that’s where a university can offer unique value.
Getting to this point has not been easy, but it wouldn’t have been possible at all were it not for the space, the freedom, and the time that a university can provide.
But that raises a harder question—why doesn’t this happen more often?
Knowledge creation, innovation, and co-implementation with research users to deliver benefits. Communicating our ideas in a way that shows pathways to impact.
So, for the remainder of this address, I will talk about how Australia can better leverage the ideas and the ingenuity cooked up in our research labs every day to provide actual, tangible solutions to the problems facing our society.
Unleashing the power of Australia’s universities
Including Liverpool and the guys up in Taree, my team works with half a dozen organisations.
That includes local councils, businesses with a few dozen employees, governments, and one of the biggest companies in the world.
These groups differ in terms of their approach and what their ultimate goals might be.
But whatever their motivation, what they all need is proof that what I’m offering does the job I say it does and to be able to answer any question their bosses might throw at them.
They need to know the product is consistent, that it’s up to Australian slip standards, that the aluminium is food safe.
They need to know that the economics work out, and no one wants to be accused of greenwashing, so we need to prove the product is actually as sustainable as we say it is.
To get that proof we spent long hours in the lab trying different things, perfecting certain processes, starting again if it didn’t work, optimising temperatures, and changing the ratios of textiles and glass, figuring out which glue was most sustainable and cost effective.
But in my basement laboratory in Kensington, protected from the pressure of having to turn a profit, I had the latitude and the time to answer each of these questions and a thousand others.
The measure of the success of a product like mine is in how many people buy it, how much profit it yields for investors, how much waste it diverts from landfill, how much carbon we can avoid burning.
In other words, having a wonderful tile that works perfectly in the lab is only step one.
To get here, I have been the beneficiary of several important government programmes.
The Trailblazers programme for recycling and clean energy is a federal government initiative that connected me directly with industry and was instrumental in taking my work out of the lab and putting it in JamesStrong’s aluminium can factory.
And Australian Research Council funding has supported my research into e-waste in partnership with RenewIT in Lane Cove.
This has allowed me to work with my partners like Liverpool, like Jamestrong, and like RenewIT, to fine tune our product so that it worked not just in the lab but in the real world.
It has taken time, and that’s what makes universities unique: we can spend time to figure things out and make sure they work.
Research fundamentals at universities
Now collaborating with industries and communities and local governments, we can amplify benefits across the entire country and even the globe, delivering benefits for people and planet.
We want to understand the world and use that understanding to improve people’s lives.
Colleagues in social science, design, built environmnent, science and engineering and other disciplines are collaborating to achieve better outcomes for everyone.
To get there we need to see more opportunities to adapt our industries and communities so that they can use circularity as a norm. For that we have to imagine what circular economy in our industries and communities would look like, perhaps we need to think about small scale and empowerment of communities to pursue circular economy and remanufacturing at a fit-for-purpose scale.
That’s not how it should be, we should measure success not just in terms of publications, but in terms of problems solved.
We need to tweak the professional incentives and to bridge the valley of death—to fund applied research pilot lines that will allow us to commercialise our work and make sure both business and government are getting in on the party.
And finally, we have to buy what we’re inventing, set ambitious targets for the use of Australian innovations, because unless we create value then our very clever inventions aren’t worth a thing.
We need to make sure government departments are using Australian tech, and that we reward companies that invest in Australian R&D with preferential consideration in government tenders.
The possibilities here could be world changing.
We have to ask what society needs and then we have to deliver it, whether that’s batteries that don’t require costly, polluting chemicals to operate, or new metals and polymers that have recyclability written into their DNA.
That kind of ingenuity is in a university’s blood, but we have to harness the ideas, to build them, and prove that the power of Australia’s tertiary institutions lies not just in the quality of our research, but in our ability to move the dial on the challenges which define the modern world.
We are lucky that our most important resources are the passionate people who show leadership everyday in industry, in government, and in universities. Where are all collaborating and working together to reimagine what a future based on the foundation of circular economy would look like when it creating better outcomes for people and planet.
I think it’s a hopeful story, I think my goals are achievable.
We can do all of this stuff, the technology works, it’s not expensive if you’ve got the budget of a council or a medium sized business.
We’ve done the science, we know it works.
We know the status quo doesn’t work, and we know that the future relies on doing things differently, on seeing the value in things we have discarded.
There is nowhere on earth that wouldn’t benefit from a solution to what we do with the endless flow of material that each of us is chucking out every single day.
My microfactories are not the whole story, the waste crisis isn’t just one issue but many and it requires many solutions.
There are reforms we need to see, for example, and we need to design better products.
But we’re getting there, and I’m very proud of this work and my part in that story.
I’m also excited about what’s coming next, because once a machine gets into the hands of real people, they start to imagine all sorts of uses I never would have dreamed of.
I don’t know where my technology ends up, who will use it and how, but it began in a basement laboratory at the University of New South Wales.
Thank you.
Veena Sahajwalla is a National Treasure that builds Treasure from used Treasure.