You might use one to dry your hair or wash your dishes. There’s one in every elevator and ventilation system. And in industry they run machines, pumps, fans, conveyors and more. I’m talking about electric motors. They are quite literally everywhere and they use a lot of energy.

Labelling something as ‘waste’ indicates it has no value. We want people to understand that everything that gets thrown out - except for hazardous materials - is a potential resource. Essentially, we want to ‘mine the urban ore’.

With landfill sites under strain, can Australia’s capital cities benefit from waste to energy processing? Pablo Perez-Reigosa from Coffey Environments explains how the technology works and its successful implementation in Europe.

The legislation, guidelines and criteria that have to be met to discharge water from a construction site have tightened immeasurably over the past decade or more. No longer is it a case of getting the water into the nearest stormwater drain or watercourse, no longer can contaminated water just be pumped down the sewer under basic agreements. The management of water has to be carefully considered before embarking on a construction project.

In the wash-up after ‘carbon Sunday’, leading UK-based climate change strategist with global engineering firm MWH John Hobson has this advice to offer Australia as it enters into negotiations to legislate for a carbon-price mechanism.

Thin-film or crystalline 'thick-film'? Mono or poly crystalline? German, European or Asian? The huge choice of solar panels available on the market makes deciding on one or the other a real headache. For David McCallum, General Manager at Conergy Australia, quality panels must fulfil three criteria: they must be high-yield, solid and safe.

Australian buildings are becoming so much more efficient that the NABERS rating scale is being extended from 5 to 6 stars.

The transition to renewable energy is set to deliver an economic pay-off in the years to come. Various studies show that a shift to alternative energy sources will raise the GNP in the coming decade and create new jobs, as Prof Eicke Weber, spokesperson for the Fraunhofer Energy Alliance, points out. Fraunhofer scientists are developing concepts and solutions for the transition as it takes shape.

Large-scale farms of the agave plant used to make the drink tequila could be established in Australia's arid inland as a novel and greenhouse-friendly solution to our transport fuel problems, a University of Sydney academic has found.

Viterra is an agribusiness providing premium quality ingredients to leading global food manufacturers and its Tamworth malt facility has a grain capacity of 45,000 tonnes, supplying malt both domestically and internationally.

Until recently, Local Authorities in Queensland and Tasmania owned and operated their wastewater treatment facilities. Many of these plants were old, undersized and provided substandard levels of treatment. In most cases, the smaller plants used trickling filters or facultative ponds. By the 1970s, extended aeration package plants and oxidation ditch-type activated sludge plants became more common.

With growing concerns in Iraq about the heavy air pollution, the country’s Ministry of Environment took a decisive step in the direction for improved monitoring, control and prevention of air pollution, and announced a tender to procure five fixed and one mobile air quality monitoring stations to monitor SO₂, NOx, NH₃, O₃, SO₂, CO, PM₁₀, PM_2.5, methane, non-methane, BTEX and VOCs.

Coffey Environments has over 15 years of experience in the injection of chemical amendments into contaminated groundwater and lithologies across a broad range of contaminated sites throughout Australia. The company recently acquired the only licence in Australasia for Wavefront Primawave pulsed injection technology that has been demonstrated to improve amendment injection efficiency. To complement this new technology, the company developed a Remediation Amendment Injection Device (RAID) to provide a more effective chemical amendment delivery system that is claimed to provide higher success rates and safer injection events.

Rapid developments in medical technology, the paradigm shift to patient and family-centred care, and the inability of aging hospitals to accommodate the latest models of care, have all contributed to the current worldwide boom in hospital redevelopment.

For many Australian food manufacturers there is increasing pressure from government agencies to reach higher standards of wastewater treatment for environmental discharge. In fact, throughout the western world, food manufacturers are facing similar challenges.