Infrastructure

Treating human waste consumes energy and produces greenhouse gas emissions, while being a major expense for councils and water utilities. However, scientist Qilin Wang is working on technology that could turn wastewater treatment plants into carbon-neutral energy generators.

It’s a mammoth and expensive task to maintain the infrastructure that delivers perhaps the most essential of our essential services: water. But predictive analytics is saving money, water and disruption by helping utilities pinpoint the pipes in their networks at greatest risk of failure.

Researchers at UTS Science have worked with numerous industry partners over multiple decades on innovative materials that improve energy efficiency and human comfort in our buildings.

A multi-disciplinary team bringing together science, sustainable building design and architecture may soon develop the first living algae buildings in Australia.

A vision of how we could live more sustainably into the future is being realised in a quiet pocket of Sydney’s western suburbs. Opened in 2016, Fairwater was heralded as one of the country’s most progressive, environmentally-friendly community developments: 800 homes set in a landscape including wetlands and waterways, and with the largest geothermal heating and cooling system in the southern hemisphere.

Despite negative public perception, government regulation may have an important role to play in supporting collaborative models of leadership.

Seawater desalination has been hailed as the way of the future for meeting our ever-expanding water needs, but current methods are inefficient and environmentally destructive. In a world first, an international team of researchers has developed a method for extracting more fresh water from the process, and recovering valuable resources from the by-products.

New technology being developed by UTS scientists in Australia – the world’s driest inhabited continent – is recovering water from unconventional sources that include saline groundwater, wastewater from mine sites and human urine from city lavatories.