About

Inventor • Scientist • Entrepreneur • System Builder

For more than two decades, my work has focused on a practical idea: waste should be engineered as a source of valuable materials, energy, water, and infrastructure—not simply managed as a disposal problem.

My work today continues through two focused technology ventures: Harvest Nano and Waste2Nano.

Pioneering Waste Mining

Practical Science for Difficult Real-World Problems

I have spent more than two decades working on a simple but demanding question: what valuable resources are hidden inside the waste streams that are hardest to manage?

My approach has always been practical. I am a scientist by training, but my work does not stop with research, publications, or patents. I focus on taking scientific principles into the physical world—designing processes, building machinery, operating pilot systems, producing real materials, identifying failures, and improving technologies until they can address real industrial problems.

That philosophy led me early in my career to what I call Waste Mining: treating waste not simply as something to dispose of, but as a resource containing materials, water, energy, and economic value that can be recovered.

I began applying that thinking to one of society’s most difficult waste streams: municipal wastewater and sewage solids. Instead of accepting sludge as an unavoidable treatment by-product, I worked on systems designed to recover cellulose-rich material before it became conventional sludge and to transform that recovered material into useful industrial feedstock.

The same engineering philosophy later expanded into other complex waste streams. Post-consumer textile waste presents a different but equally difficult challenge. Used clothing is heterogeneous, contaminated, chemically treated, and increasingly composed of difficult fiber blends. Solving that problem requires more than recycling equipment—it requires intelligent sorting, contamination awareness, material separation, process chemistry, machinery, and a valuable final product.

That work became the foundation of Harvest Nano’s textile platform: combining Smart Sorting, contamination-aware processing, cellulose recovery, microcellulose, and nanocellulose production.

Today, through Waste2Nano, I am extending the same Waste Mining philosophy into the intersection of wastewater infrastructure and next-generation computing—looking at wastewater, waste heat, sewage solids, PFAS, microplastics, and data-center cooling as parts of one connected engineering system.

Across these projects, the waste stream changes, but the method remains the same:

Understand the waste → Identify the hidden value → Develop the IP → Build the machine → Operate the process → Produce the material → Scale the system

I am most interested in problems that are considered too dirty, too complicated, too variable, or economically unattractive for conventional solutions. That is where practical science matters most.

Waste Mining is not simply a sustainability concept. It is the engineering discipline of finding value where others see only waste, and building the systems required to recover it.

Patents & Technology

More Than Two Decades of Invention

My public inventor record spans several technology fields, including:

Wastewater Resource Recovery
Cellulosic Feedstock & Waste-Derived Materials
Nanocellulose Manufacturing
Textile-Derived Nanocellulose
Smart / Automated Textile Processing
Material-Processing Systems
Biotechnology & Osteoclast Differentiation
Plant-Derived Compositions & Processes

The portfolio includes issued patents and published or pending patent applications developed across more than two decades of scientific and engineering work, including technologies for recovering cellulose from wastewater, manufacturing nanocellulose, processing secondhand textiles, producing nanocellulose from cotton-rich textile waste, and earlier biotechnology inventions involving aquaporin biology and osteoclast differentiation.

View Dr. Aharon’s Public Patent Portfolio

In the Lab and in the Field

My work has always run on two tracks at once: the laboratory bench and the field engineering that turns a laboratory result into a working system. That has meant applied plant-science research and growth-chamber work, tissue culture and cellulose development, and, earlier in my career, plant-derived consumer product development. It has also meant direct, side-by-side comparisons of water and wastewater treatment outcomes, and the hands-on machine building, troubleshooting, and process adjustment required to move each of those projects from a promising result into recoverable material at meaningful scale.

Publications & Media

Selected Work and Coverage

Explore selected material across scientific publications, patent publications, technology and industry articles, Harvest Nano videos and demonstrations, Waste2Nano news and insights, and independent media coverage.

Dr. Refael Aharon

Harvest Nano | Waste2Nano | Waste Mining

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