here.<\/a><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\u201cPrimarily due to increasingly strict environmental standards around water quality and air quality which kind of facilitate its use in greater quantities,\u201d explains Dr Lewis Dunnigan, CEO and co-founder at Bygen.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201c…They\u2019re called forever chemicals, so they don\u2019t actually naturally break down. So if they get into the human body it takes a very, very long time for them to actually be excreted. And that can have implications on the body\u2019s health. So there\u2019s now a bit of a race on to remediate contaminated sites.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p>\n
(As a side note, three nominations for Australia\u2019s 50 Most Innovative Manufacturers so far have addressed PFAS. Two directly, through environmental remediation technologies, and a third through a product offering an alternative to products that traditionally use PFAS.)<\/span><\/p>\nBesides their intense black colour, a feature of activated carbons is their high internal surface area due to their network of pores, which can be used to adsorb nasties from solids, liquids and gases.<\/span><\/p>\nDunnigan\u2019s company was spun out of the University of Adelaide while he was completing a PhD.<\/span><\/p>\nTheir low-temperature activation process is able to create activated carbon from agricultural waste while sequestering carbon dioxide \u2013 a big improvement on traditional methods.<\/span><\/p>\nDunnigan says these fall into either the physical or chemical activation categories. One uses steam at about 1,000 degrees celsius to treat coal — releasing about 18 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of product created — and the other uses strong acids or bases.<\/span><\/p>\nAccording to Bygen, their process is self-sustaining when up and running, and requires temperatures of only 200 degrees in combination with a mixture of gases.<\/span><\/p>\nTheir major feedstocks at the moment are wood and nutshells, as these are cheap and available in volume at centralised, nearby locations.<\/span><\/p>\nRecent R&D has focussed on activated carbon specifically tailored to PFAS remediation and able to capture short-chain as well as long-chain species of PFAS chemicals.<\/span><\/p>\nOn the whole, innovation for the team is typically around trying to create a new material to achieve a certain result (for example to capture a problem type of chemical) or improve the way they make an existing material.<\/span><\/p>\nDunnigan says that having a technically-minded team \u2013 the three founders began while studying or supervising chemical engineering PhDs \u2013 has meant that they accept that not every target will be met right away.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cAny failure, if you want to call it that, really can provide very, very crucial learnings to help tailor your R&D approach afterwards,\u201d he adds.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cI think anyone who\u2019s been involved in research in the past knows that the success rate in a lot of R&D efforts is quite low. We certainly don\u2019t have the mentality that every missed target in terms of whatever QA\/QC metric that we\u2019re looking at is a failure.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nAs for innovation, Dunnigan says he personally understands it as about calculated risks.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cI think innovation is really about looking at a problem, coming up with an approach to help solve that problem, and knowing that there is a great degree of risk there,\u201d he tells us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cBut the rewards of actually achieving that outcome outweigh the risks. So it\u2019s really about being brave in the way you go about doing your work.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nIn this episode of <\/span>@AuManufacturing Conversations with Brent Balinski<\/span><\/i>, Dunnigan tells us about how and why Bygen got started, how their small size and early stage influenced their business model, some unforeseen challenges around skills, and more.<\/span><\/p>\n