• Question: Does your work find any new uses for unwanted materials?

    Asked by Sarah_McHale to Ashley, Catherine, John G, Laura, Ray on 11 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by EthanFox.
    • Photo: Catherine Conaghan

      Catherine Conaghan answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      Not for unwanted materials in my job, but sometimes we find uses for unwanted energy e.g. if there is heat generated that is unwanted, instead of being wasted it could be used to heat water for a house. Or storing electricity by charging a battery instead of wasting it so it can used at a later time. We have also stored energy in ice so it can be used later when it is needed. These are just some examples.

    • Photo: Laura Tobin

      Laura Tobin answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      Yes! I have a very small budget so if there is any free material, I take it. Outside of work, I like to make things. I go to hackathons like http://sciencehackdaydublin.com/ideas-2014/ to team up with people and make cool projects.

      I work in renewable energy and I am very concious of finding ways to reuse materials. I’ve seen some really inventive ways of this at an event I co-organise in Trinity every summer http://www.dublinmaker.ie – it’s where people come and show off things (robots, software, science experiments, 3D printing etc..) that they’ve made. Many of the groups use recycled materials.

    • Photo: John Ging

      John Ging answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      Not really, but then we don’t have anything unwanted really.
      Some of the projects I’m involved with are looking at different uses for waste heat or waste grass etc but not necessarily my employer.

    • Photo: Ray Alcorn

      Ray Alcorn answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      Yes.. For full scale devices we use recycled steel

    • Photo: Ashley Culbert

      Ashley Culbert answered on 16 Nov 2014:

      Yes we reuse as much as we can. Each site has unwanted material that we have to remove when building the wind turbines and roads. We usually reuse this somewhere on site creating a raised area for plants.

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