Tech Me Out

Healthcare waste is seen as the grubbiest type of waste and yet, we believe it can be re-imagined into a resource. The discussion will focus on how we might re-design products and waste monitoring so we can engage with the circular economy and reduce our single use plastic waste in healthcare.

Natural dissolved organic matter reacts with chlorine during water treatment and produces undesirable compounds called disinfection byproducts. Ireland uses 82% of water supplies originating from surface water containing more dissolved organic matter than groundwater or rainwater. Consequently, they exceed very often the regulation for disinfection byproducts. Disinfection byproducts may be predicted using machine learning at the treatment plant to adapt the water treatment or at the catchment scale to identify specific organic matter sources causing high disinfection byproduct content.

Did you know that sea shells have something in common with the materials present in your computing devices today? Ferroelectrics are a type of material that can switch their electrical polarisation when exposed to an external electric field. These materials have applications everywhere from data storage to processing. Many ferroelectrics are grown using a method called low-saturation CVD. In this method, metallic vapors are deposited on a substrate. This is similar to the process of bio-mineralization in which calcium carbonate is deposited onto a surface to form an organism's shell.