Inventor Turns Waste Plastics Into Steel

Professor Veena Sahajwalla of UNSW has won the top prize in the Innovation Challenge awards run by The Australian.

AsianScientist (Dec. 24, 2012) – Professor Veena Sahajwalla of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) has won the AU$30,000 top prize in the Innovation Challenge awards run by The Australian.

A passionate recycler, she was honored for her patented “green steel” process, in which old rubber tires and plastic are used to replace some of the coke in the electric arc furnaces that generate power for the production of steel.

Her approach, which has been commercialized by Australia’s largest manufacturer of long steel products, OneSteel, has already prevented more than a million tires from ending up in landfills.

Sahajwalla’s interest in recycling mountains of rubbish and waste materials was sparked early in life.

“As a child growing up in India I walked to school past huge waste dumps picked over by desperately poor communities,” she said. “I always wanted to turn that waste into something we could absorb back into industrial production.”

Sahajwalla won the AU$5,000 prize in the Manufacturing and Hi-tech Design category of the competition as well as the overall AU$25,000 prize, in a competition that attracted hundreds of entries, including a folding flat-pack house and do-it-yourself hearing aids.

Scientia Professor Sahajwalla is Director of UNSW’s Center for Sustainable Materials Research and Technology. She is also Associate Dean (Strategic Industry Relations) of the UNSW Faculty of Science and is one of Australia’s best known engineers and scientists, having been a judge on the ABC TV program The New Inventors.

In May this year, was appointed as a commissioner on the Australian Government’s Climate Commission.

Watch Prof. Sahajwalla’s TedxSydney 2011 talk:

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Source: UNSW.
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