The Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC) is getting ready to host its fall Illinois Biochar Group meeting. Meetings are held three times a year and are usually located at ISTC. The Illinois Biochar Group encourages research in the production and use of biochar including the project topics: soil amendments, site remediation, carbon sequestration, and supercapacitors. Continue reading “Illinois Biochar Group Meeting – Fall 2012”
Grand Opening of the Indoor Climate Research & Training Facility
The new Indoor Climate Research & Training (ICRT) program training facility was completed earlier this month and ISTC hosted an invitation only Grand Opening Ceremony. Dr. Manohar Kulkarni (ISTC Director) and Paul Francisco (Research Engineer and Program Leader for ICRT) kicked of the ceremony with welcoming remarks and short history of the ICRT program. Special guest Lt. Governor Sheila Simon was given the honor of cutting the ribbon for the official opening of the training facility. Continue reading “Grand Opening of the Indoor Climate Research & Training Facility”
Award-winning documentary “Bag It” comes to the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center
The Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC), a division of the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is hosting a screening of the award-winning environmental documentary Bag It at the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center located at One E. Hazelwood Dr., Champaign, IL 61820 on October 25, 2012 from 7:00 to 9:00 P.M. Click here for a map and directions.
Bag It follows “everyman” Jeb Berrier as he tries to make sense of our dependence on plastic bags. Although his quest starts out small, Jeb soon learns that the problem extends past landfills to oceans, rivers and ultimately human health.
The average American uses about 500 plastic bags each year, for about twelve minutes each. This single-use mentality has led to the formation of a floating island of plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean more than twice the size of Texas.
The film explores these issues and identifies how our daily reliance on plastic threatens not only waterways and marine life, but human health, too. Two of the most common plastic additives are endocrine disruptors, which have been shown to link to cancer, diabetes, autism, attention deficit disorder, obesity and infertility.
The screening will also include a short talk about ISTC’s research project “Plastics to Oil” in which Dr. B.K. Sharma will discuss how he uses pyrolysis to convert plastic bags into oil. One potential use for the oil is as a substitute for food oils in biolubricants.
ISTC recognizes the importance of reducing single-use plastic use for the safety of its community and the environment. Its mission is to be at the forefront of environmental and energy research and innovative technological advances that protect natural resources and reduce wastes. ISTC imparts this knowledge to the general public, businesses, state agencies, and the scientific community to improve the environment and economic viability of Illinois, the nation, and the world.
Screening Date: October 25, 2012
Screening Time: 7:00 to 9:00 P.M.
Screening Location: Illinois Sustainable Technology Center, One E. Hazelwood Dr., Champaign, IL 61820
Admission: Free
This event is open to the public.
Science & Technology at the Market
This fall the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC) at the University of Illinois will be presenting information about several of its research and outreach projects at Urbana’s Market at the Square. Topics include:
• September 22 – Waste Biomass Projects: Turning waste into energy. Come learn how ISTC researchers, Dr. Junhua Jiang (Senior Research Engineer), uses biochar – a black carbon-rich solid made from biomass – in supercapacitors. Dr. B.K. Sharma (Senior Research Engineer) and Joe Pickowitz (Environmental Engineer) will also present how they turn everyday household and restaurant waste into bio-oils/bio-lubricants and biodiesel.
• September 29 – PPCPs in the Environment: More and more we hear of various chemicals being found in our streams and rivers. ISTC researcher, Dr. Wei Zheng (Senior Research Chemist), will discuss his research on fate and transport Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products (PPCPs) in the environment.
• October 6 – Sustainable Electronics Initiative (SEI) and the Indoor Climate Research & Training: Have you ever wondered where your discarded electronics go or just how much electronic waste the US produces each year? Visit with Joy Scrogum (Emerging Technologies Resource Specialist) who can answer these questions and others about SEI, e-waste, and responsible recycling.
Your home is your sanctuary; a place where all the worries of the world go away. Learn with Bill Rose (Senior Research Architect) and the ICRT program about way to improve your sanctuary’s performance in the areas of indoor air quality, roofing materials and attic ventilation, freezing pipe conditions, thermal performance at wall-ceiling junctions, and more.
• October 20 – Mud to Parks: Have you ever seen abandoned industrial areas that are eye sores in communities? Come learn how ISTC’s John Marlin (Research Affiliate) helped to discover how river sediments can be used to turn old industrial sites into parks.
• October 27 – Water Use and Reuse: Ever wondered how your drinking water gets cleaned? Learn how a couple of ISTC researchers, Dr. Kishore Rajagopalan (Associate Director for Applied Research) and Eric Duitsman (Chemist), clean a variety of liquid wastes with reverse osmosis membrane technology.
• November 3 – Waste to Oil: Dr. B.K. Sharma is back to demonstrate how he turns those pesky plastic grocery bags and other discarded plastic items into oil.
For more information on ISTC and/or these topics, please visit www.istc.illinois.edu or contact Elizabeth Luber at 217-333-7403 or eluber2@illinois.edu or Nancy Holm at 217-244-3330 or naholm@illinois.edu.
Sustainable Electronics Seminar Series; Next Webinar Scheduled for Sept. 19
This fall, the ISTC Sustainability Seminars are focused on the Sustainable Electronics. The series kicked off on September 5th when Professor William Bullock and Joy Scrogum presented “Electronic Waste: Our Problem and What We Should Do About It.” See the Sustainable Electronics Initiative Blog post on that webinar, and check the ISTC web site for the archived version.
The next event, which will be hosted at ISTC headquarters in Champaign, IL and simultaneously broadcast online will be a presentation by Dr. Callie Babbitt of the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) on “Adapting Ecological Models for Linking Sustainable Production and Consumption Dynamic in Consumer Electronic Product Systems.” This webinar is scheduled for Wednesday, September 19 from noon to 1PM Central. Registration for the webinar is available at https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/541176247. Those on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus are invited to come to ISTC to view the presentation. See the Sustainable Electronics Initiative Blog post on this webinar for further details.
The ISTC Sustainability Seminar series is a year-long series of seminars, usually one or two per month, presented by researchers, business professionals, and policy makers. It is an opportunity to share scientific research and discussion with peers in a relaxed, informal environment. Please feel free to bring a lunch to the local presentation. Seminars usually last about an hour and questions are welcome. The seminars will be broadcast live and will also be videotaped and archived on the ISTC website, www.istc.illinois.edu. Continue reading “Sustainable Electronics Seminar Series; Next Webinar Scheduled for Sept. 19”
The Printer’s National Environmental Assistance Center at ISTC
Since its inception in 1995, The Printers’ National Environmental Assistance Center (www.pneac.org), has served as a valuable and comprehensive environmental resource for the printing, publishing, and packaging industry. PNEAC is the leading web site for printers and those who assist printers interested in improving their environmental performance. The program is principally funded by U.S. EPA. The Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC) is the coordinating agency for PNEAC.
PNEAC is a unique and effective partnership between industry, government, and university technical assistance providers. It serves those who interact with the printing industry — one of the largest manufacturing industries in the United States, North America, and the world. The PNEAC mission is to assist regulatory agencies and technical assistance providers by delivering current, reliable environmental compliance and pollution prevention information to printers, publishers, and packagers.
The PNEAC web site has been recently redesigned and new features include compliance and technical tools and resources supporting carbon emission reduction and energy efficiency. The site offers compliance information, fact sheets, case studies, virtual printing plants, contacts, program information, print process descriptions, and training.
Debra Jacobson is an Environmental Engineer and Printing Waste Reduction Specialist, and serves as the Director of the PNEAC. She also has coordinated the Great Printers Project and the Illinois Great Printers Project. Ms. Jacobson has been involved in the printing industry for over 20 years. She provides technical assistance to printers and related businesses regarding pollution prevention opportunities and authors compliance assistance tools, including manuals, fact sheets, and other resources for the printing industry. Jacobson also serves as Regional Operations Manager in the Oak Brook office of ISTC. She is responsible for providing technical, environmental and safety compliance assistance to industrial facilities within Illinois.
Scientists look to turning plastics into oil
On Midway Island in the Pacific Ocean, a mother albatross returns from a trip out to sea to feed her chick. Unfortunately, she has mistaken a few of the countless, small pieces of plastic in a floating island of garbage as an appropriate meal for her chick, which will die as a result.
With the negative impact of ocean-bound plastic waste, a trend of increasing gas prices, and an uncertain future in foreign oil importation, many people think changes are needed to protect both the environment and the economy.
As part of the effort to address these concerns, researchers at the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC) are looking into the process of converting carbon-rich plastic into oil that could kill—or in this case, save—two birds with one stone. They hope that a system of creating energy out of otherwise wasted plastic material will scale back the amount of plastic waste that ends up in landfills, the oceans and other waterways as well as decrease the nation’s dependence on foreign oil.
While plastic recycling programs are prevalent in many communities throughout the United States, much of the plastic that people dispose of is mixed in with regular garbage that is bound for a landfill.
Because the base material for most plastics is petroleum, it is possible to recover a percentage of that starting material with a series of chemical reactions.
“If we cannot recycle that completely then why should we waste that carbon?” asks ISTC Senior Research Scientist B.K. Sharma, who leads the ISTC’s plastics-to-oil project.
As a way to step in and prevent this plastic waste from going out the door and into an ocean or a landfill, Sharma and other researchers at ISTC are studying one way to add another “r” to the popular phrase “reduce, reuse, recycle.” They hope to add “recover”.
In order to recover that oil, plastic must be heated to a high temperature in the absence of oxygen in a process called pyrolysis. In one of the labs at ISTC, researchers load plastic into one of the two containers of a bench-top device, seal the top and begin to apply heat.
As the temperature increases, the molten plastic material breaks down into petroleum compounds, and a gas is produced. The gas rises to the top of the container, passes through a tube and empties into some water held by the device’s second container. Here, the gas vapors condense into liquid oil. The oil is less dense than the water, so it rises to the top and can be collected.
The process can convert three types of plastics into oil—polyethylene (recycling numbers 2 and 4), polypropylene (5) and polystyrene (6).
One of the most visible uses of polyethylene is in plastic grocery bags. Whether drifting down the street or caught in a tree, these bags seem to be everywhere, creating a widespread litter problem that is very difficult to clean up.
Plastic bottle caps and yogurt cups are examples of polypropylene that can be converted into oil. However, a silicone lining is often underneath the top of the cap to prevent leaks and must be removed prior to pyrolysis. Examples of polystyrene products include Styrofoam, disposable cups, plates, cutlery, and jewel CD cases.
Sharma’s work is part of a larger body of research into the pyrolysis process, which he and other ISTC researchers have been studying for over two years. They have been using waste biomass as the starting material in much of their research, and six months ago Sharma began looking into using plastic as a feedstock.
During small-scale lab runs, one gallon of oil is produced from eight lbs of plastic, Sharma said. Although only small amounts of plastic-derived oil are being produced by ISTC research, Sharma feels that if implemented on a larger scale, the resulting crude oil can be further refined into significant amounts of energy products, such as diesel, gasoline, and jet fuel.
ISTC is a division of the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
For more information call:
B.K. Sharma, ISTC Senior Research Scientist
217-265-6810
Radio stations WDWS and WHMS interviewed Dr. Sharma about the project. The archive is available here: PLASTICSWRAP
Campus food waste become campus soap
When students who produce sustainable energy generate a “waste product,” they don’t wash their hands of it. They wash their hands with it.
Members of the soap group of the Illinois Biodiesel Initiative (IBI), are experimenting with recipes to create functional and marketable soap from glycerin, a by-product of the reaction that produces biodiesel. The IBI is a registered student organization at the University of Illinois. Members are working to improve upon a sample of liquid dish soap that they gave to the Ikenberry Dining Hall earlier this year, as well as developing new soaps to sell to other outlets on campus.
The Initiative works under the guidance of Joe Pickowitz, environmental engineer at the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC), a division of the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois.
IBI is an independent division of the campus’s Engineers without Borders group. Its main project is to collect waste vegetable oil from campus dining halls every week and convert it into biodiesel. The Initiative then sells the biodiesel back to the university through the campus’s facilities and services department to use in its vehicles.
Founded in 2006, IBI has made soap production a crucial part of its goal as a sustainable student group since fall 2011. Because only about 80 percent of the biodiesel reaction’s yield is fuel, the soap group is in charge of utilizing the remaining glycerin.
In January, the soap group gave 45 gallons of liquid soap to the dining hall, which Pickowitz calls “the test bed for the whole project.” There, it was used as a prewash in the dish rooms—only a few hundred feet from where the soap’s parent oil may have been used to fry a batch of chicken wings.
The soap helped clean the dishes, but it left behind a residue on the dishes and in the dishwashing machine, said chemical engineering sophomore and Soap Production Officer Stephanie Roupas. The group is addressing this concern by testing and reformulating batches of liquid soap and said they hope to have a new batch ready for the dining hall before summer break. The soap group is preparing other samples for university housing as part of a proposal to replace the hand soap in dormitory bathrooms with a product that is sustainably manufactured right on campus.
Along with liquid soap, the group has been testing different recipes for solid soap. The form of the final soap product depends on which strong basic compound is used as a catalyst in the biodiesel reaction. While potassium hydroxide produces liquid soap, sodium hydroxide produces solid soap.
In the solids preparation lab at ISTC, Soap Research Lead Olivia Webb, who is a freshman in agricultural and biological engineering, demonstrates one problem with the solid soap. A recent batch has the consistency of Play-Doh, and it is difficult to remove samples from the pan.
“See, it’s not supposed to do that—where it’s sticking like that,” she says. “This is still useable as soap. It’s just not as marketable.”
Still working toward a perfect batch of soap, the group overcomes defects like this by carefully experimenting with new ingredients, different cooking times, and varying ingredient ratios.
Marketability may be difficult for the raw version of the soap, Webb says, because it’s brown and smells a bit like a fry cook after a day’s work. In an effort to make their product more appealing, Webb says they will re-batch the pan of bar soap to make it harder, so they are able to sell it on campus. They are also adding a scent to the sample that they will present to university housing to make it more attractive. Because most commercial dyes and scents are not sustainable, students have begun to color the soap with environmentally friendly products, such as algae, and are looking into using natural, essential oils rather than fragrances.
While they are developing their soap to be a more marketable product, Webb says they are not planning to sell it anywhere beyond campus this early in the game, as they strive for both environmental and economic sustainability.
“It would be a lot easier to start in the university so we have something to say [to consumers], ‘Our soap actually works,’” she remarks. “And it’s also easier to sell to people in the university because your shipping and packaging costs are low.”
Interns provide help on ISTC programs
ISTC had several student hourly workers and interns joining us for projects this summer.
• Nathan Tissier is a junior at the University of Illinois completing his degree in agriculture and biological engineering. He has been providing laboratory support in the ARIES program for several months. His current projects include speciation of arsenic compounds in Hawaiian algae and summative mass closure of biomass for energy crops. He is an avid golfer, fisherman, and other outdoor activities.
• Joe (Huizhou) Yin is working as a student hourly with B.K. Sharma. Joe is studying for his B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Illinois and expecting to graduate in May 2013. He has been working with B.K. on his research on conversion of low quality oils to lubricant base oils through chemical modification.
• Tina Dinh is working as student hourly with Wei Zheng and B.K. Sharma. Tina is a B.S. Chemical Engineering student at Illinois and is expecting to graduate in Dec. 2013. She has been working on biochar project to study its effectiveness in preventing fertilizer run-off.
• Seth Rients has working as an intern with Joe Pickowitz this summer. Seth is in the Professional Science Master’s program on Advanced Energy and Fuel Management at Southern Illinois University. He has been working on developing a variety of water reuse systems for the laboratory and building, as well as examining ways to reduce water use in the production of biodiesel at ISTC.
• Wonky Yuen is working as a student hourly with Xinli Lu. Wonky is the third year PhD student in Civil and Environmental Engineering, at UIUC. He has been working on groundwater availability, heating & cooling potentials for the sponsored project – Illinois Groundwater Source Geothermal Resource Mapping.
• Chris Yim is a senior at Central High School who is participating in a 4-week internship with Junhua Jiang. His research with Junhua has been on electrochemical detection of nitrite using biochar electrodes. Chris is taking part in a pilot program called the I-STEM High School Summer Research Experience which was organized by the I-STEM office on campus.
Indoor Climate program launches new website
A new website for the Indoor Climate Research & Training (ICRT) program is now live. It is available at http://www.indoorclimate.istc.illinois.edu.
The ICRT program is part of the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC), a division of the Prairie Research Institute (PRI) at the University of Illinois. The program began when the University of Illinois received a grant to establish a training center for those involved in the Illinois Home Weatherization Assistance Program (IHWAP). The program now has expanded to additional areas such as:
• Training and certifying assessors and others from community action agencies throughout the state who perform weatherization work on qualifying residences.
• Performing indoor air quality research on lead in paints and radon migration.
• Evaluating impacts of different ventilation standards on human health in homes receiving energy-focused retrofits.
• Evaluating the energy savings and indoor air quality impacts of retrofits performed under the Weatherization Assistance Program.
• Developing training curricula for the national home performance industry.
ICRT is headquartered in the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center building at One Hazelwood Drive on the campus of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. The program also has a classroom building at 2111 S. Oak Street, Suite 106 in Champaign.