Turning tyres into steel

“The goal of the work that we do is to appreciate the kind of resources we as human beings throw away into landfill sites. We look well and truly beyond a conventional recycling strategy where the goal is to convert plastic into plastic and glass into glass”.

Scientia Professor Veena Sahajwalla, Director , SMaRT Centre, UNSW

We first met Scientia Professor Veena Sahajwalla when we invited her to speak at Pecha Kucha Night Volume #24 in Sydney, asking each participant to address the theme of ‘home’. For Veena, this is the research and development made into the transformation of waste materials and the exciting possibilities and solutions for the built environment and beyond, including the breakthrough technology developed by her team that transforms the unlikely combination of old rubber tyres and plastics into steel – a process she has patented and is now being used by One Steel in Australia and will soon begin production in the UK and Asia. The focus at SMaRT Lab is to look at ways to turn ‘unrecyclables’ into new materials so the possibilities for industry are very exciting.

Veena Sahajwalla and her team at UNSW are now involved in our project Other Ways of Seeing Cities so stay tuned, more on that soon.