From Lahore to Kokkola: A Chemist’s Life Between 45°C and −35°C

Matter never stops resonating with the stories it has been through – and neither do the people who spend their lives reshaping it.

That’s not a metaphor, but that is what happens. The material on my workbench consists of composite materials: glass fiber or carbon fiber embedded in hardened resin, pressed under heat that causes the two to become a single material. For several years, it exists in the shape of a wind turbine blade, which spins above the Finnish landscape, harvesting energy out of thin air. One day it will be done. It cracks, or it gets old beyond its usefulness, and the industry views it the way people look at things they no longer know what to do with. The resin was not planned to biodegrade. The landfill does not bat an eye. And then the question arrives at my work desk: can this material be made to matter again?

At Centria University of Applied Sciences in Kokkola, I work with composites, believing they don’t die when their first life ends. Conventional recycling breaks composites into lower-value materials, but functional recovery preserves the fibers and the resins by giving them another life. The difference is as simple as recycling is turning a violin into sawdust and teaching it a new song is a functional recovery. One eradicates the memory; the other echoes it.

My love for chemistry is as old as my love for Lahore (Pakistan), not because it’s beautiful (it is), but because once you fall in love, you can say things you had no words for before.

The blades of modern wind turbines are made of high-performance composites: glass fibers or carbon fibers usually bonded together with thermoset resin systems like epoxy or polyester. The fibers give strength and stiffness, and the resin matrix holds everything together and gives a lightweight material that can withstand decades of mechanical forces, temperature fluctuations, moisture, and continuous wind forces. These composites are designed not only to be durable, but also to be stable under repeated strain, thus maintaining the function of the composite structure over a long service life. Under the form of aerodynamics, there is a delicate balance between fiber and resin, which influences how it carries force, ages over time, and ultimately how it can be recovered and given another life.

My love for chemistry is as old as my love for Lahore (Pakistan), not because it’s beautiful (it is), but because once you fall in love, you can say things you had no words for before. I taught it for four years before life brought me to Finland, to this cold, and to this work. The weird habit of looking at something ordinary and asking what it is really made of, and where it will go when it perishes, turns out to be exactly what this work requires, and the purpose of me being here.

In the science of composites, there is a concept called the interface – the relationship between resin and the fiber that bonds into something stronger; and it is where the strength truly lives. I always think the same is true of people and of life itself: the most meaningful things are formed not in isolation, but where different worlds learn to be together.

The wind blade on my work desk has already spent years bearing the pressure of wind, already done with the purpose it was designed for. My work starts after that – in seeing the value in what others call waste.