David Tuffley, Senior Lecturer in Applied Ethics & CyberSecurity, Griffith University Australia’s ability to compete with other nations in a technology-enabled world is declining, according to a report recently released by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA). In 2019 Australia dropped to 14th on the global league table of digital competitiveness, down from…
Comment by Peter Roberts The news this morning is that Rip Curl, the iconic Torquay Victoria surf brand is being sold to New Zealand’s Kathmandu for $350 million. And so another great Australian dream of designing and manufacturing great products completes its long, slow decline to full overseas ownership. The Rip Curl story is yet…
By Andrew Dempster, Director, Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research; UNSW In the wake of Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s meeting with US President Donald Trump, the Australian government announced on Sunday a commitment of A$150million “into our local businesses and new technologies that will support NASA on its inspirational campaign to return to the…
The South Australian government has granted major project status to a venture which aims to become Australia’s first commercial rocket launch site. Southern Launch is aiming for its Whalers Way Orbital Launch Complex “to get off the ground in 2020”.
By Angela Skujins South Australia has embraced the circular economy with a state-wide ban of single-use plastics, a commitment to renewable energy and a roster of reputable companies driving reuse. Although the United Nations reports that less than 10 per cent of all the world’s plastic is recycled, South Australia diverts more than 80 per cent…
Adelaide’s Fleet Space Technologies is one of the success stories in Australia’s burgeoning space startup industry. Brent Balinski spoke to CEO and co-founder Flavia Tata Nardini about its recent $10.8 million funding round, and the current shortage of available launches.
By Katherine Wynn, CSIRO Growing interest in healthy and sustainable lifestyles could be worth about A$25 billion and make up about 10% of the value of Australia’s food and agribusiness sector by the end of next decade. These projections are made by Australia’s industrial research agency, CSIRO, in an economic analysis published today. The high…
Brent Balinski spoke to Professor Sharath Sriram, RMIT’s Co-Leader, Functional Materials and Microsystems Research Group, about commercialising a novel way to detect heart disease from saliva.
In 1992, Mark Yates founded Replas, which makes outdoor products including bollards, decking and furniture, and recycles up to 4,000 tonnes of plastic a year. Yates tells Brent Balinski what to make of the current discussion we’re having around recycling, and about a recent project making handplanes out of reclaimed marine litter.
By Jeff Seadon, Auckland University of Technology Recycling in Australia used to be fairly simple. Our older readers may remember bottle drives, paper and cardboard collections, and the trip to the scrap metal merchant to sell metals. This is called, in recycling parlance, sorting the “streams”. It creates very clean recycling that requires little sorting…