Sustaining Sustainability
Chemical Formulation lecturer Dr Ali Reza Nazmi with a student. Source: University of Canterbury / YouTube.
Content warning: Mentions of deaths from the Bhopal incident in India.
The most crucial aspect of sustainability is the education of our youth, particularly the role of educators. If the oldies aren’t gonna do it, it’s up to the younger generation to make a change. But how can we implement this into our professional futures?
At the University of Canterbury, three dedicated lecturers are quietly championing the integration of sustainability principles into their teaching – providing a sustainable lens for their students heading into the work force.
Dr Daniel Holland, the Head of the Chemical and Process Engineering department, explores the realm of chemicals through a sustainability approach. He notes that students are increasingly drawn to the course by their passion for environmental stewardship, rather than solely financial motivations like back in the day.
While talking to high school students about the degree, Morrison used a shower as an example to illustrate how their studies can work out how daily activities can impact CO2 emissions. He explained that a 10-minute shower could produce a significant amount of emissions over a year. By reducing shower time to three minutes and using water-saving showerheads, emissions could be greatly reduced to a quarter of what they were.
Holland with students. Source: University of Canterbury.
Holland recognises that Chemical and Process Engineering has historically overlooked sustainability, contributing to significant harm – such as the Bhopal incident in India, which killed 3,800 people.
He continued, “But that also means we're ideally placed to be able to address the problems because it means that we also have all the tools in place to deal with things in large quantities.”
While the courses in this discipline don’t explicitly teach sustainable practices, Holland explained that they’re teaching students about how they can help develop processes to be more sustainable.
“They're very good at being able to recognise that different bits of it will all interact with each other. And so if you make this bit more efficient, it might actually make it another part of the process less efficient,” he said.
When Holland was a student, sustainability was “nowhere near as important as it is now,” he said. “It was more about how to do something as efficiently as possible.”
Over the past two decades, Holland has noticed a shift in the aspirations of these engineers toward addressing major global challenges related to food, water, and energy.
“As a world, we need to be able to address all of these things. And the only way we can do it, because of the scale of the problem, is to use some other techniques that that were born out of Chemical and Process Engineering.”
When asked if they could be more sustainable in their practices at the University, Holland addressed how for their experiments, they have to learn how to heat up materials, which became very wasteful in the past due to heating large quantities of water and draining it away. Now, they can recirculate the water. But he made an interesting point that seemed to continue across all of these lecturers.
“Although that was wasteful, and it was a good thing to address, it's a tiny impact on the world. And the decisions that the students make are actually going to be far more important than anything that we can do within the programme itself.”
Sharing this ‘big picture’ mindset is Dr Ali Reza Nazmi from the School of Product Design. When discussing plastic, the youth of today, and awareness of these issues, Nazmi echoed similar educational and personal sentiments from a scientific perspective.
Dr Ali Reza Mazmi in his office after discussing his area of interest, sustainability. Source: Elsie Williams.
“I noticed that actually, none of these scientific, amazing innovations that we come up with can do any real effect on the world, until you work with, people in law and people in policy to actually make it possible and make these things to push forward.”
Nazmi, a Senior Lecturer of Chemical Formulation design, is known for his expertise and research on sustainability. He specialises in waste valorisation: the process of reusing, recycling, or composting waste materials, converting them into more useful products, including materials, chemicals, fuels, and other sources of energy.
The School of Product Design is fresh on the scene. It’s six years old, to be exact, so Nazmi uses his interest in sustainability to morph the study scape into an environment-focused design space.
“Basically, to help find that added value to waste that we normally chuck away.”
Nazmi redesigned the foundations of the degree to focus on using biowaste, due to Aotearoa’s mass output of the organic matter. He advocates for solutions that add genuine value without causing further environmental harm.
With Sustainable is Attainable, a research project focusing on waste reduction, Nazmi was able work with companies that were producing a lot of waste that would usually keep quite confidential what they do with it.
“Fortunately, there is willingness now more than before in a lot of industries to actually do something positive… they have to spend money to send their waste to landfills. So instead of spending money, they can give it to us for free. And the product might even at one point, if it's scalable, might even bring them benefits.”
He explained the third-year project for those in his course, where the students design a product using components from biowaste of their choice. Despite the course not initially having sustainability as the focus, Nazmi believes the students do really appreciate it, proving that his interest has had a domino effect.
“I think, both I'm learning and they are learning. The focus is not to make a perfect product with branding and everything, the focus is actually on the sustainability.”
Working just down the corridor from Nazmi is Dr Hossein Najaf Zadeh, a fellow Product Design lecturer, but in the field of Industrial Product Design.
Nazmi and Zadeh collaborate on a project called the “Dragon’s Den”, where students from both the Industrial and Chemical Formulation fields create products from waste materials and compete for a $5,000 cash prize.
The 2023 winner created an edible paint from grain extractions, perfect for children.
Zadeh is passionate about embedding sustainability into education. He champions the circular economy, where materials are reused or recycled to minimise waste.
“We try to make sure that we generate less waste material, we collaborate with each other, the staff, academics, technical staff, to make sure that we use renewable sources of materials, and also recycle our own material here.”
Industrial Product Design prototype in Hossein’s office. Source: Elsie Williams.
Using systems like reusing, re-engineering, refurbishment, and recycling, this course uses material like hard hats and up-cycles them into pieces of furniture.
“It's not just an idea to transfer this material waste material to a product. We want something functional and useful,” said Zadeh.
Zadeh reached out to Sustainable Network, an organisation which helps make businesses more sustainable. He asked the organisation to design challenges for companies regarding their waste materials, which often end up in landfills. These materials are then assigned to students, who research them, their sources, and their supply chains. Using this information, the students generate ideas and processes to create new products from the waste materials.
But as Zadeh said, “You've always got room to improve, right?”
Whilst discussing what they could improve on, he acknowledged their use of laser cutters and 3D printers. “But we are working on it,” he said.
Industrial Product Design uses a lot of 3D printing for prototypes, which uses PLA, a biodegradable material which needs industrial facilities to biodegrade.
This year, collaborating with the Faculty of Engineering, they’ve secured the budget to buy a machine which can recycle the printings up to five times.
Zadeh believes sustainability is taken very seriously at the University of Canterbury, but evidently, there’s always more that can be done. But who better to keep the ball rolling than our educators?
“We are not just claiming that sustainability is really good thing. We show that in practice.”