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UNSW SMaRT Centre Director Prof Veena is a key speaker at the Industrial Transformation Australia 2025 Conference: Accelerating Industry 4.0, on 22 July.
Set for 22-24 July, 2025 At the Dome, Sydney Olympic Park, Industrial Transformation Australia is the premier platform for sparking innovation and strategic collaboration among manufacturers, technology providers, and thought leaders.
Veena is also on the advisory committee for the conference, a Hannover Messe trade show for manufacturers, technology providers, and thought leaders to exchange ideas and best practices, build new networks and catalyse opportunities for innovation.
In her talk, Harnessing the Potential of Recycled Materials - A Smart Vision for a Sustainable Future, Veena will highlight that using innovations such as UNSW SMaRT Centre's recycling and MICROfactorieTM technologies that recover valuable materials from waste and reform them into new manufacturing feedstock and products through collaborators, are central to help achieve the sustainability needed for the future.
She will be joined on stage by Renew IT CEO James Lancaster who operates under licence to UNSW the first Plastics MICROfactorieTM outside of the SMaRT Centre.
They will talk about the joint partnership and commercialisation journey, and discuss how to drive business value through supply chain strategy, and of course the benefits of a circular economy and sustainability.
Veena will share her 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.
Event website and registration
In a blog post for the event, Veena says:
"The most exciting opportunity I believe revolves around the alignment of recycling and manufacturing. This is about creating a whole new “remanufacturing” model where resources recovered from waste can directly become the feedstock of new products. There are emerging technologies that can reform various hard to recycle or complex wastes into new value-added products and manufacturing feedstock, and our various UNSW SMaRT Centre-designed technologies attest to this.
"Best known of these technologies is SMaRT’s Green SteelTM Polymer Injection Technology, which is well known for using millions of waste rubber tyres destined for landfill as an alternative source for partial replacement coke and coal (carbon) in electric arc furnace steel making. The next generation of Green SteelTM research now shows tyres are also effective and contain hydrogen which improves the efficiency of steel making. The Green Ceramics modules reform waste textiles and problematic glass, into a range of ceramics for the build environment, while the Plastics modules, which reform hard plastics coming from e-waste not being recycled, into filament for 3D printing and new manufacturing needs. We think this alignment of recycling and manufacturing is the greatest opportunity to shift the dial."
Organisers say:
Set for 22-24 July, 2025 at The Dome, Sydney Olympic Park, Industrial Transformation Australia is the premier platform for sparking innovation and strategic collaboration among manufacturers, technology providers, and thought leaders.
This event goes beyond traditional trade shows by catalysing the exchange of ideas and fostering network growth, all centred around the latest in automation, data exchange, and IoT technologies.
Industrial Transformation Australia is the trade show for Industry 4.0, representing the people and companies contributing to the coordinated and proactive approach to leveraging digital technologies, and creating step-change improvement in industrial operations.
But how did we get to Industry 4.0? Before 4.0, there was Industry 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0, each shaping Industrial Transformation in its time and representing an enormous leap in the availability of industry-defining technologies throughout the supply chain and logistics sectors.
Industrial Transformation Australia is not just a trade show, it’s an arena of innovation and cutting-edge technologies that are shaping the future of Industry 4.0. This event assembles a diverse mix of insightful speakers and leading technology suppliers, all key players in driving the digital revolution in industrial sectors.