Treasures

Professor Veena Sahajwalla, Director of the Centre for Sustainable Materials Research and Technology (SMaRT) at the University of New South Wales in Australia, has found a way of turning landfill into steel.

Her pioneering invention, green steel, has the potential, once scaled, of solving the global landfill problem and the steel production emissions problem at the same time.

Veena's philosophy: it's only trash if you don't know what to do with it. Once you know what to do with it, it goes immediately from being trash to being a treasured resource.

Which gets me thinking: how much of our world - both physical and nonphysical - are we currently writing off as trash, simply because we don't know what to do with it? What are the hidden treasures and resources we are currently missing out on through simply a deficiency of imagination and application?