Each month, this page will feature 2-3 chapters' curent projects - new results, next steps, and in general helping to keep everyone abreast of ESW projects. We will also be featuring an article on a particular topic each month - written (at least for now) by our own Alexander Dale, the Director of Communications & Technology. At the end of each section, you'll find a link which will take you to the relevant area of the forums to discuss what you read here, ask questions, and get to know other members of the ESW community.
We look forward to highlighting all of our chapters, and hopefully both educating and provoking discussion with the articles. If there is a specific topic you would like to see, feel free to post it on the forums, or email info@eswusa.org.
The members of ESW-PSU are teaming up with two local Green companies, MatsonEnvironmental and Invinity, to complete energy audits on fraternities houses at Penn State. We are partnering with six different fraternities and hope to have two full audits finished this semester. The one thing we are asking from the fraternities is that they follow our suggestions to improve the efficiency of their houses. We will be doing monitoring afterwards to determine how much energy was actually saved. We hope this project reaches out to the community and spreads the word of Sustainability to State College.
The Powerlion is a portable solar generator. This project is a 1.5 kW Photovoltaic system mounted on a large flatbed trailer. It is perfect for powering local festivals and demonstrating the power of the sun. After inheriting it from a local high school, we replaced all the wiring, added a battery bank, and painted the Powerlion. We are continuing renovations to improve the ease of adjusting the pitch of the panels.
USF's primary project is an EPA P3 funded effort in collaboration with municipal water authorities and local school districts.The basis of the collaboration is stormwater ponds, and environmental engineering, and their prevalence in the study area of East Tampa. Though stormwater retention ponds play a vital role in flood and pollution control throughout Florida, community funded revitalization programs in East Tampa do not address water quality, maintenance or potential impacts of the pond and community members. Engineers for a Sustainable World University of South Florida Chapter (ESW-USF) received a 2008 Phase I EPA P3 (People, Planet and Prosperity) award ($10,000) to establish collaboration between USF, Young Middle Magnet (YMM) (an East Tampa middle school adjacent to a beautified pond) and East Tampa that raises environmental awareness in East Tampa using stormwater ponds as an initial focal point.
Student assignments in the undergraduate Environmental Engineering Laboratory at USF are linked to this project through water quality analysis as the class is taught by the ESW-USF faculty advisor Dr. Maya A. Trotz and the Teaching Assistants are ESW-USF members. Informal education was done during East Tampa’s Community Survival Day. Outputs from this project include: a) curriculum development for students at YMM; b) stormwater retention pond demonstration modules and community tour; c) baseline water quality data collection for three retention ponds in East Tampa and establishment of a sustainable water monitoring program that links USF classes with YMM’s seventh grade class.
Contingent upon the success of Phase I, ESW- USF was also awarded a 2009 Phase II award ($75,000) for continuation of the Phase I work and expansion to elementary and high schools in the Tampa area. Across both Phases of the work there is involvement and collaboration of the community, an engineering undergraduate class and local elementary, middle and high schools. This allows our ESW-USF members to become involved in K-12 science curriculum development, stormwater pond monitoring and sampling, as well as informal science education in the East Tampa community.
Opinions represented here are those of the author and should not be interpreted as those of Engineers for a Sustainable World. Information here is sourced when appropriate, but the author is human, and may well make mistakes. Let him know and they will be corrected. Allow people to make mistakes without changing how you see them - it's the only way we're going to make progress in a world where failure is far more prevalent than success.
Introduction
Quiz question: Which is more sustainable, ethanol from corn or gasoline from oil? Nuclear power or exotic photovoltaics? Oak flooring or bamboo? Plastic cutlery or metal?
And the better question: Why?
None of these questions is clear cut. Ethanol from sugarcane has lower carbon emissions from production than oil, but greatly increases eutrophication from fertilzer runoff. Nuclear power creates a classic environmental problem, nuclear waste, but is that worse than mining the extremely limited supplies of rare-earth metals that we need to create many of the new generations of photovoltaics? Oak is a hardwood that takes a long time to grow, but bamboo often is shipped in across thousands of miles of ocean. Plastic cutlery doesnt need to be washed, and requires less energy to make than metal, but sticks around forever in landfills.
Next question: How can we know the numerical values for any of these questions? Answer: Quantifying (and thus qualitatively comparing) various products, processes, or services (PPS) is the focus of one of the primary tools for sustainability in engineering: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).
Scope
Dissecting the term, the life cycle of a product is everything from the raw materials used, processing and creating the product, transporting it, using it, and finally disposal. An excellent example is that of a cheeseburger. The life cycle of a cheeseburger starts with a cow or two, and depending on what fixings you like, probably some lettuce, tomatoes, and other plants. It then requires processing (milk from the cow to make the cheese, killing the cow to get the meat, making ketchup from the tomato, etc...), followed by transporting all of these ingredients to your grocery store or a fast food restaurant. You buy the ingredients and put the burger together, or buy a burger, and eat it (that's the 'use' phase). Probably you didn't get the ingredients or burger by itself, so we should also include all of the raw materials and processing required to make whatever packaging material, wrapper or bottle/container was required to house all of the ingredients for the burger. The final phase, disposal, here is mostly throwing away the packaging, though of course there are also some less savory wastes as well.
In addition to tracking all these materials, we could also track a bunch of other things, such as energy (fuels used to move things around or cook meat, electricity to power factories, etc.) or costs (not just the cost of the materials you yourself buy, but the cost of the various other parts of the cycle, such as landfilling packaging). And in terms of materials, there is another key question - how complete do we want to be in our life cycle's scope? Go back to the farming sections of this example. It took feed to raise the cow(s) - do you include the materials for that? How about the tractors needed to grow the feed? The energy needed to make the metals to make the tractor? Obviously, the total amount of energy for the metals is minute compared to the more immediate processes - but it's still there.
Inventory
The data collected in an LCA could be any or all of the above categories - materials, energy, cost - but often focuses on what materials are used and emitted into the environment as part of the life cycle - such as chromium releases during tanning leather, or fertilizer usage in growing corn for ethanol. Gathering all of these releases - known as the Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) - is a large step, aided by the existence of numerous databases. These databases allow people to use previously collected data and, with a grain of salt, apply it to their own projects. Some of these databases require subscriptions, but some are available for free - an example is the US DOE's GREET, which focuses on transportation and electricity.
Impact Assessment
Once all of the data is collected, the various releases are categorized in what's known as a Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) to create total impacts in a variety of categories. Some of these you're probably very familiar with - climate change is probably the most well known (carbon footprinting is a subset of LCA which only looks at the parts of the LCI which deal with global warming), though there are also categories for smog creation and ozone depletion. There are also categories you may not have heard of, such as acidification and eutrophication. This LCIA is generally done using an established tool - an example is the EPA's TRACI, and the categories can vary some by tool.
Improvement Analysis
So what do we have now? We have a set of interpretable impacts pulled together from the total different releases throughout the scope of our study - hopefully everything from raw materials through disposal, but also possibly raw materials up until the use phase (what's known as a 'cradle to gate' LCA). We can take those impacts and compare them to similar products or processes and see what tradeoffs exists. Case in point: Corn ethanol generally generates lower greenhouse gas emissions than petroleum (though not by that much), so if that's all we care about, we choose ethanol. But - and this is key - it causes much higher eutrophication than petroleum (because we use a lot of fertilizer). So if we care about eutrophication, perhaps we take a second look at using corn ethanol. Similarly, we can look at how much energy it takes to make each fuel, what the impacts might be on food prices, and (perhaps the most sensible starting question before we go after any technology) - how much of our demand could we fulfill with it. For corn ethanol, we'd need 2-3x the total amount of arable land in the country to grow enough corn to meet our gasoline needs.
Uses, Advantages, and Long-term Thinking
I mentioned above that carbon footprinting is part of LCA - it's one impact category from an LCIA. Currently popular environmental society spends a lot of time looking at carbon. This is worthwhile - we definitely need to reduce our emissions, that's going to be hard, and we're raising awareness and figuring out where we are. But it's vital to remember that there are many more impacts to pay attention to, just as there are a lot of problems in addition to climate change - things like the dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and Chesapeake Bay, the health impacts from burning fossil fuels, water quality and supply issues, etc. Full Life Cycle Assessment is thus important for several large reasons:
It gives us an idea of what a product requires throughout it's whole life, rather than just in the phase where we use it. Even technologies frequently touted as 'carbon-free' or 'greenest' probably have some emissions or other impacts at some point in their life cycle - what happens to green chemical X during processing, or after you pour it down the drain? These are really important questions in a sustainable world - we can't just pay attention to one small part of something if the major impacts are somewhere else and expect to get by forever in a closed system like Earth.
It shows us tradeoffs, rather than just the one area we're originally interested in. Knowing the carbon footprint of something is important. But knowing the tradeoffs (and almost everything has tradeoffs - it's a pretty gloomy realization, but there you have it) can help us lower all of our impacts rather than minimizing carbon at the expense of the oceans or our fresh water supplies.
It promotes life cycle and long-term thinking. This is similar to point 1, but a little more abstract and less quantified. Rather than buying incandescents because they are cheap right now, life cycle thinking would have us buy CFL's (tradeoff: manageable mercury) or LED's (tradeoff: currently quite expensive) because in the long term (over their life cycle, that is) they'll cost less and have lower impacts on the planet. You can expand this to a different level and get to the Brundtland Report's definition of sustainable development ('Development which meets the needs of the present without affecting the ability of future generations to meet their own needs') by looking at the life cycle of generations. Oil and other fossil fuels are great if you don't have to care about the effects in 40 years - and if you only pay attention to this generation (think of it as the use phase), you don't. But if you consider the longer cycles (this is the 'kids and grandkids' argument for anyone who's still following along), the impacts are so much bigger that you have to pay attention, and maybe find a lower impact solution to energy. It all ties together (see next month for more synthesis and values ideas).
Standardization and Offshoot Methods
So that's the basis of what LCA is - scope of study, collecting data to build an LCI, characterizing the impacts in an LCIA, and suggesting improvements. The specifics of how to do each of these is standardized by several places, the most recognized being the ISO, where LCA falls under the 14040 standard. Various places are now requiring LCAs to be done on products for a variety of reasons, from getting points in green rating systems to releasing products in the E.U. Other agencies which deal with LCA include the EPA and SETAC.
In addition, the idea of LCA is present in several other analytic tools. Life Cycle Costing can help to compare diesel generation, where upfront cost is low but you buy fuel forever, with something like photovoltaics, where upfront cost is very high, but maintenance is much lower. Material flow analysis tracks how a certain material moves around a system - this can range from tracking copper in Europe to how waste moves around the Hawaiian Island of Oahu, and can help figure out where improvements could be made. A final example is called Economic Input-Output LCA (EIO-LCA), which uses data on all the industries in a system buy from each other to find the total impacts without the scope problems of a standard LCA (a free tool for this is available from Carnegie Mellon).
Conclusion
It's a big topic - there are far too many details to get into to cover it all in one article (long and dry though it may be). If you have questions, I'd encourage you to take a class if it's available, browse around the internet (which, so long as you look at a bunch of different parts of it, is a pretty good source of information), and, if you still have things you'd like to know - or things you'd like to talk about - come talk about them on our ESW Forums.
Sources and More Information:
LCA information is available from many different places - it's getting to be a fairly well known topic, given its complexity. My background in it comes from coursework and research, and the examples I've used are standard ones from both there and in the news. The hamburger example is adapted from an adaptation by Joyce Cooper which references a website that no longer exists. A length primer on LCA is available from the UNEP/SETAC and includes several of the examples I've used - the chromium in leather, tracking copper flows, and the standard example of PV vs. diesel. The question of corn ethanol is well published (though there are many articles on greenhouse gases and not as many publications which address issues such as eutrophication and water use). The reference to waste in Hawaii is from the Journal of Industrial Ecology, which also features an excellent piece on the mercury in CFLs.
