So welcome everyone to 100 Climate Conversations. Thank you so much for joining us. Today is a number ten of 100 conversations. The series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, which is climate change. Celebrated as a great period of technological innovation, the Industrial Revolution resulted in the release of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the air, causing the climate crisis. And in the context of this architectural artefact, we’re now shifting our focus towards the innovations of the net zero revolution. Yiradhumarang mudyi, Rae Johnston youwin nahdee, Wiradjuri yinhaa baladoo.

My name is Rae Johnston. Hello friends. I’m a Wiradjuri woman. I was born and raised born and raised on Darug and Gundungurra country and that’s where I hold responsibilities to community and country and it is an honour to be working here today on the unceded land of the Gadigal, and I wish to pay my deepest respects to their Elders, past and present. I also want to extend that respect to any of my First Nations brothers and sisters, aunties and uncles that are here with us today or tuning in, watching. And I think as we begin today’s conversation, it’s important to remember and acknowledge that the sovereign First Nations Peoples of this continent are the world’s first technologists and scientists and engineers from the world’s oldest continuing cultures, despite all attempts to erase them. And that’s something that we should all be very proud of. I’m lucky in my field I get to hear some good news. So I am very excited today to be chatting to the incredible Veena Sahajwalla. Visionary inventor, Professor Veena Sahajwalla, sees waste as an opportunity and through her work as Director of the Sustainable Materials Research and Technology Centre at the University of New South Wales, she’s engineering new ways to combat and find value in waste that drive down manufacturing’s carbon footprint. I’m a big fan and I am very thrilled to be speaking to her today.

Thank you Rae for that very generous introduction and very kind of you. Thank you for having me. This is fun, this is what I love doing, chatting to people who are so passionate about what we all can do about this important topic.

And you have been working in sustainability and waste for decades now. Do you remember when talk of climate change started entering the discussion about your work?

It’s quite interesting in the early days when I’d sort of talk about what we’re doing in developing green steel. Usually the conversation would be, why do we need to even do it, why bother? Why are we talking about using materials other than coal and coke in the production of steel? It was almost like you had to start with that conversation, that said, ‘No actually this is going to be better for our planet.’ Before you even get into a lot of the scientific and engineering details, I had to literally have a conversation that tried to tell everyone why it was so important for us to be able to think about green steel and make green steel.

It’s an opportunity that I’ve had and really that privilege to go from something that’s been conceptually innovative, to be able to take all of that science and engineering coming out of my labs at UNSW at the SMaRT Centre and to be able to then tell the world the story of why we’re doing this, how we’re getting there. It’s really nice that we’ve got industries who have worked with us and have partnered with us over the years. I think to me that’s also an important thing to celebrate and to recognise; the fact that being able to translate all of that science into practice and to do that with our steelmaking partners and to be able to really go to the heart of this question that you can always look at any material as fundamental as steel, to be able to go back and say, ‘No, wait a minute, we can actually invent green steel now and we can do it in a way that nobody else in the world is doing.

That gives me a lot of goose bumps, but also for our partners in community and in industry to be able to bring in things like waste tyres and to kind of show that well wait, it’s actually not waste really, it’s a fabulous raw material. I think to me that is so exciting, the fact that you can see waste tyres in a whole new light and I remember in the early days, the conversation was, ‘What tyres? What does it contain that can help it in the process of making steel, aren’t they just a stack of old tyres that are no longer useful?’ And I think to me again, that was the fun moment when you get a chance to talk about all that science and the development of science, but also importantly talk about all of that engineering.

What does it mean in a practical sense? And that to me was really that ultimate icing on the cake because we weren’t just talking about, we could do this in our labs or we could do all the brand new science, which I think is awesome, but I think the fact that we’ve got businesses who are literally hanging on to the words of, ‘Oh, there’s a whole lot of hydrogen in here. So that horrible old tyre, if you found a way to use that in the making of green steel, it could liberate all these important molecules so we could get hydrogen and then we could also get that carbon that you need to make steel and you don’t have to potentially use coal and coke to do that? .’

That concept, even that innovation in a conceptual sense, has to be something that we nurture and no matter how outrageous and crazy it might sound because you just never know which of those concepts could be brought to life. And if we can bring it to life and we can show that it can have an impact and it can make such a big difference and we can be pioneering that right here in Australia. I’d love to be able to say that, ‘Yes, this is the first place where science happened on green steel and the innovation came to life, where steel makers in Australia have been really committed to this.’ I think to me that’s the bit that really gives me hope for the future.

We are going to be talking about a few scientific topics today. I did want to start with maybe some basic definitions of some things so that we can all follow along. So what is embodied carbon and why is it important to consider not just the energy required to make a product, but its whole life cycle?

I think when we look at materials, all the things that we need to make our homes and our beautiful museums, places like this, and everything that we need, it requires materials. So fundamentally we’re talking about whether it’s steel, whether it is ceramic materials and polymers and all of these different materials, it requires energy, but it also requires basically all those molecules. So you think about all of that energy that’s gone into making it and sourcing it and putting it into a form that makes it functional. But then when we say, ‘Okay, well wait a minute, now it’s stopped working in the current form,’ that doesn’t mean that those materials and those molecules that went into making it in the first place are not useful anymore.

So fundamentally, when we start to think about what went into making it, and if you could imagine for a moment, you could have this X-ray vision and you could look inside all these materials, those basic molecules that you have in there are basically building blocks of giving us this incredible sort of wealth of materials and products and everything that we need. But imagine if we could then say, but wait, after it stopped working, it’s not a waste, but it’s actually a resource that’s just waiting to find another life. So, why are we even calling it a waste? So imagine that whole sort of circular way of thinking could be real because we can imagine and re-imagine over and over again all the different ways in which those materials could actually be reformed. And so when I talk about reform, I’m actually saying it goes beyond recycling.

So yeah, absolutely, we should do the three Rs: reduce, reuse, recycle. Those are the three Rs we should be doing. But what we also have to say is we need to go beyond that three Rs beyond recycling and saying, well, what if it can’t be recycled in the traditional way of converting one plastic bottle into another plastic bottle and so on? That’s a great thing we should be doing, absolutely. But what if our products are more complex? What if they’ve now changed the way they’re made? So we’re going beyond that recycling and we’re thinking about reform. So we’re reforming its structure, we’re reforming its chemistry. And so that’s why when we think about the whole of life of any particular material, it never stops being useful. And I love to think of the fact that the power of imagination is really with us, so if we’re committed to the whole circular solutions and the way we think about how every material embodies those little, little packets of energy that went into making it so that’s your embodied carbon.

But also importantly, all that feedstock, all that material that went into making that product, that material never dies. So imagine if we could not only preserve those materials, but if we could keep bringing it back to life over and over again. But to do that, we need to actually rethink the way we talk manufacturing. So when we see a material next time that’s fallen apart, we shouldn’t even be talking about it as a waste. We should be saying, ‘Well, wait a minute, this is now a resource that’s just waiting to be brought to life in a whole new form.’ And it doesn’t matter who does it, whether it’s the person who’s making your buildings or the person who’s making your electronic devices or somebody who knows how to do amazing work with repair. So that’s why it’s a holistic way of thinking about the benefits. There are environmental benefits, there are social benefits, economic benefits, so all of these benefits for our communities is what is at the heart of why we need to think about circularity, why we need to think about what our communities can do collectively.

You spoke about how much has changed since you began and we’ve made a lot of progress in the areas of renewables and electricity generation. But some of the industrial processes that you’re talking about of our most consumed materials, we still need to change those and there still needs to be some solutions. So from your perspective, what is the significance of industry and manufacturing when it comes to climate change?

Absolutely, these are important points because whatever you make in industries, you need all those resources like we were talking about, you need your energy, you need materials. And so if you can imagine in all of these cases, if you’re able to use renewable energy, if you’re able to think about your materials like we’ve talked about as renewable materials so that they keep coming back to life over and over again, we can imagine that all kinds of factories and in our case the reason why we’re saying micro-recycling needs to happen in an industrial setting. But what does that look like is what micro factories are all about, that we think about recycling and manufacturing where the primary feedstock in terms of material is all of our waste resources. So this is what we need to start to think about; that production has to first and foremost be looking at what’s available in my region.

So if I know that there are certain kinds of waste resources that are going to come into my region, I need to imagine that kind of collaborative economy where we’re not necessarily always relying on products being made in some other part of the world and coming in from overseas. I think first and foremost, really starting to think local, regional really is so empowering for our communities and for our businesses. Yes, it’s about energy, yes, it’s about materials, but it’s also about transport. Why do we need to think always everything must be made in some other part of the world or I need to wait for that particular component or that particular part to come from somewhere from overseas. Imagine a whole economy that’s built off the back of people repairing, making printed objects and doing that from metals and we could be doing that from ceramics and plastics.

And if we could actually imagine that economy that says, well, wait a minute, I only need 20 parts of that. I don’t need to order hundreds and hundreds of parts from somewhere else. I could go to that production guy who’s in the town next door and I know that girl there is really a cool designer and I know that that other girl there loves to make all kinds of cool things in a micro-factory and that girl is me. I love to think that – sort of imagining a future where whether it’s about our research, whether it’s about how we work in universities, how we work in the technological space and manufacturing, we don’t have to have all the answers on day one, but that’s exactly the beauty of this kind of collaboration. We’re developing a whole new way of thinking, that mindset that says these are the feedstock materials we need and we’re going to create a whole ecosystem and that ecosystem can show that different kinds of materials can always be moving around in our economy, in our societies, and that then enables all kinds of new businesses.

I’m curious, you grew up in Mumbai and there’s a very different relationship to waste there than we experience here growing up. And you’ve described in the past finding inspiration in seeing how those items are repaired and reused, how there’s this whole economy of second hand and fixed products.

Yeah.

Tell me though about how waste is different in Mumbai. How is it viewed differently and how did it inspire you?

I guess the first point to make is I don’t think anybody would call anything a waste in Mumbai. People would love to be able to be very clever and entrepreneurial and going in it doesn’t matter whether it’s the guy down the road who is fixing your shoes, you could be wearing those very shoes for years and years and years. And that’s what I do is go and get it repaired, get it repaired and you can just see those simple things that we all can learn from each other. So the fact that I remember as a kid having all those conversations with a guy down the street who would love to repair shoes and I’m sure I was a really annoying little kid who’d kind of wouldn’t just want to get the shoes repaired, would want to find out a bit more about it. So why did you put that there? Why did you do that? And as kids do, you never want to give up that curiosity and asking the whys.

So I think to me, that was part of what I loved and the fact that everyone, even though I’m sure I was a pretty annoying kid, everyone would take their time to have that conversation. So people would want to explain to you. I mean, all those markets and those bazaars where you could find any spare part and any component, and then someone would kind of go, okay, well now, wait a minute, that bit there, okay now someone’s brought in this old radio, I can fix that. I can take that piece from there and I can put that in here. And I think to me, I’d just love to see that happen, I could literally stand there and watch that all day long. And this is what I loved about, no matter how people were so busy and everyone’s getting on with their life and their livelihoods and all of those things, I think the fact that you can never underestimate your ability to inspire a little kid because you could just be making such a big difference to their lives. And to be welcoming and that’s what I’ve found in a place like Mumbai where I grew up.

I do want to talk more about the green steel that you’ve been working on because we’ve been producing steel the same way using fossil fuels for centuries. Why is it important to really look at and redesign how we are manufacturing steel? What kinds of impacts can it have to make those materials in a different way? What impacts on the climate can it have?

Traditionally, of course, as everyone realises and as you’ve mentioned, people have been using coal and coke in the production of steel and there are sort of different ways in which you can make steel. So you’ve got to think about that whole of systems way of saying, okay, I know I want to make steel. But what does that mean in terms of the way I bring that feedstock, that material, that resource in the production? So what that then means is if you were actually introducing and if you wanted to introduce hydrogen inside that furnace, the best thing you can do is you can actually find a way in which it doesn’t actually require a whole lot of new things that cost you too much money and too much time to do it.

So for us, part of that urgency in terms of addressing the impact on our climate was, well, wait a minute, but we already got these steel making furnaces, this is how it’s made. But what if we could, through our polymer injection technology, bring in that hydrogen directly inside the furnace, but we do it in a way by using waste resources like tyres. Because under certain conditions, in the way those reactions happen to make that metal, it requires a reducing agent. That reducing agent could be derived from coal and coke but it also could use tyres. And the fact that you break those molecules down to those small molecules and liberate that hydrogen, that carbon, that you need in the process of making steel, but you do that because you can very cleverly control how it reacts inside the furnace. So a lot of the details of that science and engineering meant that we had to actually prove that, first in our labs, we had to show that in our labs those kinds of reactions were taking place.

And the best analogy I can give you there is my favourite drink, coffee. Coffee, as some of you who might love your coffee – yes, I know we’ve talked about it in the morning today. And I’ve had my first cup already, so I’m charged. And in this case, literally with the steel-making furnace, the reason why I wanted to use the coffee and the example of charge is that the ability to have this foam, this slag foam – literally, like your cappuccino foam on the top of your coffee – is that it is an essential part in that steel-making process. So the fact that we have injected this polymer, so you can imagine and visualise you’ve got this injection lance going inside that steel-making furnace, you’ve liberated those little, little pieces of tyres that has gone into the furnace. And nice clean material reacted in a way that it has now allowed that iron oxide to be reduced to iron which is the metal that steel is made of. You’ve now created a metallic output by liberating that hydrogen and that carbon in that steel-making furnace and allowed for that conversion of iron oxide into iron. And ultimately all of these kind of changes that we are talking about, all these important ways in which we do our manufacturing, allows us to then completely reimagine how scientifically you control those reactions right down at that micro level.

You launched the world’s first e-waste MICROfactorie in the University of New South Wales, that was back in 2018. And now you’ve got the West Nowra MICROfactorie as well, that’s opening soon. Can you tell me about what waste materials are being used in those MICROfactories? What’s being made in these MICROfactories? Can we all just order something from them? How do they work?

As you know, I’m so passionate about using all kinds of waste resources for production. And so MICROfactorie really just started literally in our labs at UNSW where the goal really was if the dominant feedstock that we’re using for manufacturing is actually a waste material, we are going to actually set up our own modules to be able to step-by-step take that waste through a journey where it comes to life in a whole new form. So literally, MICROfactorie is a collection of modules, and it’s modular by nature, where you can actually have these modules control each of those modules in a different way, so they can be quite different and that’s why it’s very different to having sort of one big large-scale production, whereas thinking about MICROfactories in a modular setting really allows you to follow through different kinds of stages.

We can very quickly transform that waste into the next product, you’ve minimised how much effort goes in and processing goes in, and you can control volumes. So that’s the best part, you can still get that quality product, but you can very quickly control that right scale and you can make it fit for purpose. For us, the nice thing about that partnership where MICROfactorie has now literally, like a little child, grown up and is ready to kind of make that first move, leave home and go to a MICROfactorie in Nowra. For me that’s such a privilege, it’s that joy of seeing all of that work that our scientists, our engineers at SMaRT Centre at UNSW have put in. And for us, the partnership and the relationship with industry, as I’ve been talking about in this particular instance, is no different. Where we’ve got incredibly passionate people who want to do this because fundamentally, again, they know that by putting their hard work into it and their passion and their commitment into setting up this MICROfactorie, they’re going to make a difference to the world. And so in this particular case, it’s about using waste glass and waste textiles. So those are the two feedstock materials being used.

What are they making, what’s coming out of these factories?

I don’t know, I might have –

Oh yes, excellent!

Got a little piece. I think that I had at the museum and this is –

It’s like a little ceramic tile with bits of glass through it.

Yeah.

Have I got that right?

That’s exactly right. We call it out green ceramics and these green ceramic products are made of waste glass and waste textiles. So from our perspective, that’s what we want to be able to do, is want to show that it is absolutely feasible to take your waste materials and to convert those into products like green ceramics.

It’s so pretty as well.

Oh, thank you.

I think that there’s a bit of a misconception that things made out of what is essentially what we’ve viewed as rubbish can’t be attractive. And this is beautiful and it doesn’t look like it’s been intentionally made to look a certain way, this is just what those materials look like when they’re brought together.

That’s exactly how it comes out of the factory. That’s a good point you make about the fact that people assume that when you make products from waste, that even if it was engineered to have all the right qualities, it won’t necessarily look that great. It’s nice when people have a look at something like that and from their eyes see it as something that they would love to have. And I think to me, that’s really the ultimate test. Yes, it’s about the science, it’s about the engineering and all the things that you have to do to get to that point to make a product. But let’s face it, something like this – and listen, until users, people who want to use it, they don’t think that this is something that they would love to have unless and until people sort of feel that, hey, this is beautiful.

It is. If I wanted to say tile a bathroom in this, could I just walk into the door of one of your MICROfactories and go, ‘Hello, can you please make me some tiles? I need them this big, I need them this thick, and I need like maybe 30 of them.’

Absolutely.

And you can turn around and say, ‘Yes’?

We could absolutely so do that. And this is the lovely thing about these kinds of things that yes, we’ve got lots of people who got, as you can imagine, waste textiles and waste glass and people want to connect and say, great, yeah, we can supply you with these kinds of waste fabrics. And in this case, as you can see in yours, it’s that beautiful blue that’s gone into making it. So I love the fact that there are so many people who can see that a role that we can all play is by being a part of that supply chain. And when we think about the holistic benefits that we were talking about, it’s about saying it’s about that resource, that production, that MICROfactorie in Nowra, that ability to then say ‘This could well be something that is a beginning of a whole new way of thinking about MICROfactories.’ But the most important test, as we said, is the fact that you’re telling me that this is something you would love to have in your home. I can’t thank you enough.

But it also seems like it’s something that is adaptable to different communities, to the needs, to the kind of waste that is produced in those communities and then what end products they need. Is there any kind of limit to what MICROfactories can produce?

Oh, look, I would imagine that there are no limits. And yes, part of it is for me to go, you know what, maybe there are certain things we do need to go back and explore the science if it hasn’t yet been done. There are some things we’ve obviously progressed, in this particular case with glass and textile, but it’s about the fact that our industry partner, who is basically saying, ‘In Nowra, here’s where I want to set it up, here’s what I want to do.’ And I think to me, that’s the ultimate test of what we can do collectively. Yes, as much as we love to collaborate on that, on that science and technological aspects of what all this means, but the real test is how that translates into practical commercial outcomes. Which means for a small business and in Andrew’s case, with his business of Kandui Technologies, all of this is part and parcel of saying, you know what, yes, it could be a big steel-maker, the steel-making partner who we work with Molycorp in Newcastle – mind you, they’re more than 100 years old, so talk about old and new. There are no limits in how you can take technologies that have been seen as very traditional, but to be able to have a whole new lens on the fact that this is how we can make steel, this is how we can, in this particular case, talk about making our green ceramics for our built environment. Yes, there are old industries – you might like to think of them as old – but by the time they finish doing what they’re doing, they will be pioneering this. And to do it right here in Australia –

If they can be flexible, anyone can.

Yes, yes. But I think it comes down to the fact that at the heart of all of these businesses are people like us. The leadership there and the people who work in those spaces are people like us who care about these issues. That’s what we are really talking about, is incredibly passionate people who whether you’re in research or technology or in production or in design or using, I think to me, all of us as people can make a difference.

Beautiful. Thank you, Veena, so much for your time today. It’s been an absolute pleasure speaking with you and just hearing your excitement and your passion for the work that you do. I know that you were inspired as a child and I’m sure you’re inspiring lots of children and adults like myself with your work as it continues.

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This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time.