Clean tech lab to make products "benign by design"

In November 2013, Flinders University officially opened its Clean Technology Laboratory - a $1.1 million initiative to research and develop sustainable manufacturing methods. The establishment of the lab corresponded with the appointment of Professor Colin Raston, the South Australian Premier’s Professorial Research Fellow in Clean Technology, to the university.

Professor Raston describes himself as “the anchor to run the research”. Supported by two ARC Discovery grants, as well as funding from the Government of South Australia, his work is “all about developing processes and products that are tracking towards benign by design”.

“I guess from my point of view, you can take any technology and tweak it and make it cleaner,” Professor Raston said. In particular, he aims to avoid the use of toxic reagents in organic reactions, as well as reduce waste generation.

“When you buy your kilogram of pharmaceutical products over the counter, there could be up to half a tonne of waste sitting somewhere on the planet that went into making that, and that’s because of issues associated with waste generation for specific organic reactions during synthesis,” he noted.

Professor Raston said this waste mainly comes from the difficulties associated with scaling up reactions from small to large vessels, such as non-uniform mixing and uneven heat transfer. But researchers at the clean technology lab “incorporate scalability into the science”, he said, through a process called thin-film microfluidics and the use of a patented vortex fluidic device.

By placing a liquid on a rapidly rotating surface, chemical reactivity can be better controlled, as can the uniformity of the solution - and, by extension, the amount of waste being generated. Such control would not be possible using a classic round-bottom flask, Professor Raston said.

Not only can production processes be made cleaner, but in the future, so too could applications. Professor Raston referred to the example of drug delivery - if you could utilise nanoparticles for the controlled delivery of drugs, you’d only need a small amount of the drug, and the amount of waste ending up in sewage would diminish.

“Most drugs we take end up in the sewage, and how do you recycle sewage water that’s loaded with drugs?” he noted.

The lab has already attracted international attention, with researchers from China having shown interest in the lab’s biomass utilisation and membrane technology research. Collaborations are underway with institutions around the world, including the University of Cambridge, the University of California, Irvine, Ben-Gurion University in Israel, the University of Malaya, the University of Quebec and the University of Missouri-Columbia.

And with clean technology a focus of Flinders University, the lab receives plenty of attention at home. There is collaboration within the university “in a whole raft of projects”, said Professor Raston, “within chemical and physical sciences, medicine, biotechnology… it goes on”.