Kiwi startup Avertana has entered into a technology partnership with South African-based Nyanza Light Metals to turn waste steel slag into titanium dioxide pigment.

On level two of a 1950s building nestled in an Auckland central suburb lies a gray corridor leading to laboratories and workshops where some of New Zealand’s greatest innovation success stories were born.

The Parnell site named Level Two is now home to the next cluster of ground-breaking innovators who are set to ‘change the world’ with their technological inventions.

Mountains of slag all over the world are a Kiwi company’s idea of great riches.

The waste from mines is dumped into mounds so big that they can generate their own weather patterns — but New Zealand company Avertana says they can each be worth half a billion dollars.