Podcast and video interview with Veena on circularity

UNSW SMaRT Centre Director Prof Veena was interviewed by the not-for-profit Infrastructure Sustainability Council about creating a circular economy.

Veena talked about SMaRT's latest MICROfactorie^TM Technologies and SMaRT's vision for a sustainable future, highlighting the importance of creating a circular economy around local supply chains, and how using waste as a resource must be at the centre of our manufacturing future and innovative decarbonisation efforts, in collaboration between researchers and industry.

She talks about how innovations such as UNSW SMaRT Centre's various recycling and MICROfactorie^TM technologies recover valuable materials from waste and reform them into new manufacturing feedstock and products through collaborators, and what it takes to help achieve the sustainability needed for the future.

Watch the video

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Infrastructure Sustainability Council says:

This week on Infrastructure Connections we’re talking to Veena Sahajwalla about micro recycling and the circular economy.

The takeaways from this episode give us new ways to look at circularity:

1. Companies are starting to re-think their identity. “We’re not a waste company, we’re a supply company.” We supply resources as feedstock, resources that used to be waste for someone else.

2. “If we zoom down to the micro recycling level, every material is important.” If it was an important component of the original product, it will be important to recover for the next product.

3. “Sustainability is a normal way to think. The more we can make it a norm, the more we can think of practical ways in which sustainability comes to life.”

4. We need to think of sustainability and recycling on a local level, specific to the local industries who need it, and make that recovery a priority. This is compared to the current method of sending our waste overseas and then buying it back as sources.

Veena puts the re in resource.

Veena is the Director of SMaRT Centre (Sustainable Materials Research & Technology) at the faculty of Science, University of New South Wales. 

Her research interests include sustainability of materials and processes with emphasis on environmental benefits. She invented an environmentally friendly process for recycling plastics and rubber tyres in electric arc furnace steelmaking. 

She is an international award winning engineer. In 2012 she was named Overall Winner of the Australian Innovation Challenge Award. She was awarded the 2012 Banksia Award, the GE Eco Innovation Award and the 2005 Eureka Prize for Scientific Research.