Andrew Harris

Transcription

Andrew Harris: Hi I’m Andrew Harris. I’m an Associate Professor in Chemical Engineering and the Co-Director of the Laboratory for Sustainable Technology at the University of Sydney. Super: Andrew, what matters to you? Andrew Harris: My interests are in sustainable engineering, developing technologies in energy, water, the environment, food that will mean that we will transition to a truly sustainable society. Super: What does your work involve? Andrew Harris: One of our most successful inventions here is a technology called a porous burner and it helps mitigate the environmental side effects of underground coal mining. So coal mines produce lots of methane. So we came up with a technology to use the methane for energy generation on sites and you reduce the environmental greenhouse effects by about 90%. Super: What inspires you? Andrew Harris: Where we get ideas from to develop sustainable technologies is a field known as biomimicry. It’s deriving inspiration from nature. In fact I was on holiday, I stood on a sea urchin skeleton that went into my foot and I got it out and then put it under the electro-microscope and it has a lovely structure and the structure happens to be perfect for mopping up co2 and other gases from the atmosphere. So we’ve managed to reverse-engineer how they grow and turn that into a sorbent so we can use that to clean up power station effluent so that they don’t pollute. Super: Tell us about your team Andrew Harris: We work with chemical and mechanical engineers, chemists, physicists, biologists, mathematicians, microscopists and in every project and in every solution we’re trying to solve we bring these multi-disciplinary teams together and we just throw these good people at a problem. Super: Why should this matter to anyone else? Andrew Harris: The way that we live and interact and work on our planet is fundamentally unsustainable. We are using resources at a rate that means we are using up our natural capital, the resources we have available to us, so we need to fundamentally change our behaviour. So it may not be in my lifetime that we run out of things but it will probably happen in my children’s lifetime.