VEENA SAHAJWALLA WASTE CRUSADER
There’s so much to love about Veena Sahajwalla. Her giant science brain. Her hoarding, “What can I do with this?” spirit. Her excitement for transforming waste (or what she calls “resources”) into functional, re-usable products. Growing up in Mumbai, Veena was immersed in an economy of re-purpose and repair, and the thrill of giving life to things that no longer worked has never left her. It was perhaps inevitable that all these qualities would converge to make her a global leader in recycling and green manufacturing.
Twenty years ago, she made an extraordinary scientific breakthrough, perfecting the technique of “polymer injection,” which sees plastic waste and old tyres incorporated into the process of steelmaking. Since then, the breakthroughs have kept coming. In 2018, she was part of a team that launched the world’s first e-waste micro-factory, where valuable metal alloys are extracted from discarded smartphones, laptops and circuit boards (micro-factories use patented technology to reform waste into new and usable materials). Most recently, she has taken glass and textile waste and brought them together in a second micro-factory to create industrial-grade ceramics. All of this experimentation and manufacturing happens at the UNSW Centre for Sustainable Materials Research and Technology (SMaRT Centre), which Veena founded in 2008, and which makes its research and technologies available to others who are interested in transforming waste.
It was fun to geek out with Veena on some of the science behind her extraordinary work, and also to hear her thoughts on the individual and societal shifts that need to happen for us to move beyond our current “take-make-waste” industrial model. After all, as Veena says, “Waste is not a problem to be managed; it is an opportunity to be explored.”
Subject:
Veena Sahajwalla
Occupation:
Scientist and inventor Location:
Sydney
Date:
February 2022
NATHAN SCOLARO: I’d love to start with some of your background. You grew up in Mumbai, and I read that a big part of the economy that surrounded your childhood was around re-using and repairing, and so this concept of waste wasn’t really understood.
VEENA SAHAJWALLA: Right, well the concept of waste just wasn’t there. As a child, it was about understanding, first and foremost, how people actually make a living. It always impressed me how people would make a living by fixing shoes or clothes, or fixing all kinds of electronic stuff that we had at home. To me, it was really fascinating, because it was the creation of all these products out of things that were supposedly broken. So you could say the reason I’m such a big hoarder is because I’m always going, “I think I can re-use this, I can re-purpose this. Don’t throw it away.”
