Ken Richards

Ken has over 25 years of experience as a Managing Director in various listed and unlisted companies across the finance, agriculture, technology and renewable chemical sectors. He has a track record in managing, transitioning and growing companies, having successfully been involved in 4 start-up companies. During his involvement as a public company CEO, Ken has completed transactions, takeovers and capital raisings, in excess of AUD$200M. Ken recently retired as Chairman of ASX listed Leaf Resources following a strategic merger. Leaf, now Foresta Holdings Ltd, has redefined pine harvesting by using every part of the tree, even non-structural or knotty logs, slash and stumps, extracting, via a patented, environmentally friendly process, valuable pine chemicals. The waste wood becomes torrefied pellets to replace fossil fuels. Ken has taken on a role as non-executive director with SynergenMet Ltd, who are experts in the application of Plasma technology, utilising it to solve difficult environmental problems with clean, economical solutions. They have developed three outstanding, world class technologies: • The first is a proprietary process to recover highly valuable Gold, Silver and critical Platinum Group Metals (PGM’s) from primary ore and historically processed material (slag/tailings). PGM’s currently have extremely high political currency given China’s market dominance. SynergenMet has secured a site in Colorado with 1.8Mt of viable slag/tailings and is currently testing other potential sites in the USA. The Colorado site is an environmental blackspot, which we can help remediated by reprocessing the waste and recovering valuable critical metals. • The second is a scalable, plasma driven, methane pyrolysis technology that produces battery graphite, carbon black and clean hydrogen with no CO2. Production can also use waste gas and is “on site” eliminating the large costs associated with storing and transporting hydrogen. • Finally, SynergenMet have developed a patented PFAS destruction technology that concentrates PFAS using foam fractionation and then destroys 99.9% of the PFAS using specifically designed plasma torches. The modular, mobile, scalable units are unique in the global market and the company has been awarded two USA Department of Defence contracts. He represented Leaf Resources at Unreasonable’s Barclays Asian Impact Forum in Hong Kong in 2018 and also the 2018 World Forum in London. He was a mentor in the 2018 European Forum.