Product development for industrial symbiosis

Aotearoa New Zealand ranks in the top 20 for global environmental performance (EPI 2020). In reality however, there’s still plenty to do, as reflected in national conversations surrounding issues such as waste reduction, management and single-use plastics. Our local businesses and manufacturers have a role to play as pioneers in making industrial symbiosis — the innovative reuse of one industry’s waste, related to ideas around a circular economy — a reality.

Join us for the final Tech Tuesday of 2020, where Associate Professor Johan Verbeek from our Department of Mechanical Engineering will discuss tackling one of New Zealand’s biggest and most important challenges: how industries play their role in our investment in a sustainable future. He will present examples from his collaborations with companies across New Zealand, Australia and South Africa, along with some show-and-tell of high-value products with wasteful origins.

Associate Professor Johan Verbeek is Director of the PLASTICS Centre of Excellence within University of Auckland's Department of Mechanical Engineering. He studied at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, ultimately completing his PhD in Engineering, looking at polymer composites and using mining waste to make materials such as gib board. Johan's biggest impact has been in developing protein-based thermoplastics, for which his research group is internationally respected. Other research involved the use of chicken feather fibres to reinforce thermoplastics as well as other topics such as the recovery of proteins from wastewater using nano-clay, protein oxidation and collagen recovery from waste sources.