For immediate release
10 September 2015

Two Scion technologies are among the finalists in the New Zealand Innovators Awards 2015, announced today by the NZ Innovation Council.

TERAX™ is a finalist in both the Innovation in Agribusiness and Environment and the Innovation in Sustainability and Cleantech categories. Both categories celebrate unique technologies that demonstrate a combination of economic and environmental benefits.

TERAX™ is a patented technology for dealing with problematic organic wastes such as sewage sludge and moves the focus from waste treatment and disposal to reprocessing, recovering and recycling resources.

Rob Lei, Business Development Manager for the technology, explains that a TERAX™ plant planned for Rotorua will be about 20% cheaper than the current approach over the life of the project.

“The savings will come from eliminating around 10,000 tonnes of biosolids a year, and using recovered carbon to remove nitrogen from wastewater. In addition, the process also recovers both nitrogen and phosphorus, which can used directly in industrial applications such as fertiliser production.”

The process for making wood fibre dice (Woodforce) has been shortlisted for the Innovation in Design and Engineering award, which recognises the multiple skills involved in product design and implementation with a focus on solving customer and end-user needs.

The innovation is a way to process wood fibre so that it can be easily used to make wood-reinforced plastics.

“Although wood-reinforced plastics have significant advantages over plastics reinforced with other fibres, using wood fibre has been a problem up until now,” says Jeremy Warnes, Business Development Manager. “It is bulky and dusty, an explosion hazard when dry and very difficult to feed into a plastics extruder.”

Our innovation, which can be applied out in a standard MDF plant, binds the fibres into fibre-rich “dice” that can be fed into plastic processing equipment. The resulting wood-reinforced plastics can be used in many applications, including furniture, car components and toys.”

The Innovator Awards are run by the New Zealand Innovation Council to celebrate and recognise New Zealand’s innovators and innovative organisations. The winners will be announced on 21 October 2015 at The Cloud in Auckland. http://www.innovators.org.nz/winners-a-finalists/finalists-2015