Each year, in Australia alone, several million tons of agricultural and industrial waste ends up in landfill, or worse – up in smoke. This generates soil and air pollution, threatening our environment. However, these wastes can serve as abundant and sustainable sources of raw materials.
With our cutting edge facilities we have developed technology where agricultural (farm and food processing) waste and industrial (textile and tyre) waste can be converted into graphene-like carbon materials suited for applications in energy storage, water purification, coatings and many more. The material processing can be potentially be applied to any organic solid waste.
The waste-to-energy technology developed at QUT has already demonstrated Proof-of-Concept and scalability. Several agricultural wastes (grape marc, citrus and nut-shells) and textile-waste have been transformed into graphene-like materials and tested in future battery and coating technologies. Key research areas are as follows:
- Turning biomass into valuable porous carbons
- Surface treatments to prepare different types of porous carbons
- Green solvents for biomass pre-treatment
- Identifying new markets for carbons
