A chance encounter with the recycling industry made it clear to me that it needed fresh thinking and better technology. After a year of investigation, I established Alchemy Systems Ltd with the help of business partners who knew what I had done at Compac Sorting Equipment, and saw the opportunity to do something we could be proud of. We now have equipment installed at sites across Australia and New Zealand, and expect to commission our first site in the USA in May or June.

While waiting for my PhD dissertation to be assessed, I was employed to find a way to detect blemishes on fruit. It needed to run on off-the-shelf PCs, or similar low-cost hardware - a very tough ask. 18 months later my innovative technique was in the field and showing itself to exceed all expectations - the first commercial system paid for itself inside six weeks. By the time I left the company, 75% of sales were based on technology for which I led the development. It gave the company the cashflow to invest in new R&D and emerge as a genuine world leader in the industry.

Who could turn down a chance to work in the research labs of Australia's (then) largest company? I couldn't! Two years spread across three, punctuated by a quest to seek funding to attend the University of Edinburgh, saw me grapple with an assortment of machine vision systems, and produce instrumentation to help better control the quality of output from BHP Steel's Coated Products Division at the Port Kembla plant.