Green Austria

Nanoident AG in Linz operates
the world’s first plant for organic
semiconductor sensors.
Green powerhouse of ideas
Algae instead of styrofoam, electricity and heat produced from grass, pharmaceuticals
made from strainer residues in beer production and organic microchips: ecological,
innovational spirit made in Austria.
The key word is sustainability – and it is
more and more becoming the most important
criterion of our overall economic and social
development. Austria’s creatives are more
than ever looking in this direction and are calling
for progress only in consideration of ecologic
conditions, economic structures and social
potentials.
The country’s ‘green ideas’ are present in all
fields, ranging from the textile industry and
waste processing all the way to nanotechnology.
In this new development, flagships such
as family-run companies make use of all synergies
that help establish and ameliorate their
products’ and services’ sustainable development:
facilities for business development function
as pulsers, while numerous technical
research departments have come to take a more
and more central position as the link between
nature and society.
The trend is definitely going towards the usage
of regrowing resources, in which it has become
more important than ever to avoid
mistreating nature and its resources in an ecologically
maintainable cycle. Other fields of
growing importance are recycling, the economical
usage of energy and resources and last
but not least the aim for the new products’ longevity.
The core statement in all the ideas of Creatives
in research and development, though, is
naturally the Archilles heel of the western world:
One wants to abandon the dependance on fos-
sil fuels that we manouvered ourselves into
over the last decades. Reasons for this intention
are not so much limited resources as prices
and politics. The dream of the car that runs on
hydrogen, for example, has just come a little
bit closer to reality through research in the field
of low-temperature fuel cell systems at the
Technical University of Graz in cooperation
with industrial partners AVL List GmbH and
OMV AG.
With the growing difficulty with crude oil,
the branch currently experiences a true comeback
of technologies that work with natural fabrics
and had been pushed away because of
the possibilities of fossil resources. Natural fibres
are used in the fields of automobile manufacturing
and construction, and wood is
applied again in all imaginable areas. It is especially
enjoyable to watch the evolution of
pellets that allow for heating emissions far below
the critical values of, for example, particulate
matters.
The field of waste processing, too, can offer
some interesting examples: The Technical University
of Graz has, for example, come up with
an eco friendly product for degreasing. The
by-products in the extraction of maize kernel
are processed into a smooth granulate that is
later used for degreasing polluted metal parts
by means of sandblasting. This solvent-free
method created in Austria is mainly used in
the United States in the field of metal construction.
Another programme for lucratively recycling
a valuable wasteproduct is the
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