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 in wastewater resource recovery and cellulose began more than two decades ago, well before Harvest Nano’s textile project and the current Waste2Nano platform.
My current work is developed through two distinct 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 includes issued patents and published patent applications across 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.
Public descriptions on this website summarize published technologies at a high level and do not disclose confidential implementation know-how or alter any intellectual-property, licensing, or ownership rights.
In the Lab and in the Field
My work has consistently connected laboratory science with physical implementation, moving from experiments and material development to machinery, pilot systems, troubleshooting, process integration, and scale-up.
The common thread across my work is straightforward: identify value inside a difficult waste stream, develop the science and IP, build the physical system, and prove it through real materials and operating experience.
Publications & Media
Selected Work and Coverage
Explore selected scientific publications, industry coverage, company announcements, videos, and professional updates.
- Involvement of Aquaporin 9 in Osteoclast Differentiation — PubMed
- U.S. Patent 9,169,597
- Nanocellulose Manufacturing Patent Application
- Cotton-Rich Textile Nanocellulose Patent Application
- Secondhand Textile Processing Patent Application
- 2015 Cleantech CEO of the Year — USA
- There’s Gold in Them Wastewaters — WaterWorld
- Turning Toilet Trash into Toilet Paper — Times of Israel
- New Wastewater Mining Tech — Sustainable Brands
- Waste2Nano Launches Wastewater-Cooled AI Platform — PR Newswire
- Dr. Refael Aharon — LinkedIn
Dr. Refael Aharon
Harvest Nano | Waste2Nano | Waste Mining
© 2026 Dr. Refael Aharon. All rights reserved. Public descriptions are provided for informational purposes only and do not waive, assign, license, or otherwise alter any intellectual-property, confidential-information, trade-secret, or other proprietary rights.
