ISTC’s John Mulrow tries to peel back the obfuscation of the term “sustainable” in a GreenBiz.com’s P2 Pathways column.
http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2014/04/15/illinois-three-secret-words-mute-sustainababble
Three Tips on the Road to a Great Governor’s Award Application
If your organization has done a lot in the name of sustainability – from projects that save money and resources to initiatives that strengthen the people and communities you work for – what are you waiting for? The Governor’s Sustainability Award provides a great opportunity for you to pull all of your sustainability work together into a single document: Your award application!
Because sustainability encompasses the triple bottom line – People, Planet, Profit – it can be tough to wrap one’s brain around all that should be included in your application. Our How To Apply page and FAQ’s will help you in that process, but we know that’s a lot to read! Here are three tips to help you cut to the chase, and get started on your application (due May 22).
1. Start driving. Get key people on board.
Governor’s Award Applications are typically a team effort, but there is often a single person or small team that drives the process forward. The application drivers can be anyone – from top management to employees who volunteer time on a Green Team. If you’re reading this, you may be the driver!
Send a note out to co-workers letting them know you’re preparing a Gov.’s Award application. Here are some key people to get on board early (positions vary by organization):
- Top Management
- Facilities/Operations Manager
- Plant Manager
- Sustainability Officer/Green Team Lead
- PR Officer
2. Read these two things.
Narrative Guidelines –You have up to six single-spaced pages to describe your sustainability accomplishments. These guidelines tell you how.
Metrics Form Instructions – Download the Metrics Form (Microsoft Excel format) and read the Instructions tab.
3. Check out the sample applications.
The sample applications, available HERE, display best practices from past winners’ applications. Note that a good application typically includes a variety of projects touching on multiple impacts or aspects of sustainability. The project descriptions will also include some detail on how they were conceived and who was involved. We want to hear how your organization went from idea to implementation.
BONUS TIP: Consider normalizing your data.
Normalized data is reported on a relevant per-unit basis. One of our 2013 award winners, Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District, tracked their water use in this way before and after implementing water conservation measures in their wash bay. Instead of simply reporting total gallons of water consumed, they reported gallons per vehicle-hour, providing us with a water-use measure that can be compared across years, regardless of how many trips the buses make. This type of measurement, a normalized metric, is extremely helpful for evaluating your progress – the true impact of a sustainability project.
Check out the Illinois Manufacturer Inc. sample application for more normalization examples and talk to your team about what per-unit measures you might use in your application.
If you still have questions about the process, contact John Mulrow for more information via e-mail at jmulrow@illinois.edu or call him at 630.586.9168.
ISTC Supercapacitor Research Gets Most Online Buzz
“Highly ordered macroporous woody biochar with ultra-high carbon content as supercapacitor electrodes” by ISTC researchers Junhua Jiang, Lei Zhang, Xinying Wang, Nancy Holm, Kishore Rajagopalan, and colleagues at the University of South Carolina had the highest altmetric scores from altmetric.com for the Electrochimica Acta for the past six months. This is particularly noteworthy since the articles was published online in November.
The article by lead author, Senior Researcher Jiang, received an altmetric score of 43 for the period. The next most popular article received a score of eight.
The Illinois Hazardous Waste Research Fund and the HeteroFoaM Center (an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Basic Research) supported this study.
For more on biochar supercapacitors, visit http://www.dailyillini.com/news/campus/article_5d819c9c-45b8-11e3-8549-001a4bcf6878.html
Wood Biochar Offers Promise of Cheap Supercapacitors
ISTC is investigating wood-biochar’s use as a supercapacitor. The material offers equal power capabilities as activated carbon, but is much less expensive.
A team led by Senior Engineer Junhua Jiang published results in the journal Electrocimica Acta, demonstrating the natural microstructures of biochars can be provide effective surface area for electrodes. Currently supercapactitors are often manufactured with corrosive chemicals that create elaborate structures of out of activated carbon.
Such procedures are far more expensive and can have environmental consequences.
Supercapacitors are super because they have far greater surface area electrodes than regular capacitors, allowing the rapid collection and release of ions. Cousins of electrochemical batteries, supercapacitors do not yet store as much energy, but they can release energy very quickly, recharge quickly and have high cycling stability. In other words, supercapacitors permit much faster discharge and recharge cycles than a battery is capable of, as well as tolerance of a larger number of discharge/charge cycles.
The Illinois Hazardous Waste Research Fund and the HeteroFoaM Center (an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Basic Research) supported this study.
For more on biochar supercapacitors, visit http://www.dailyillini.com/news/campus/article_5d819c9c-45b8-11e3-8549-001a4bcf6878.html
Campus-wide Sustainable Electronics Consortium Formed
On Oct. 2, 2013, a group of interested individuals on the U of I campus met to discuss the issues involving the environmental and social impacts of electronics and the current relevant policies, education, and research taking place. As a major public university that purchases, uses and disposes of thousands of electronics, we have a duty to address these issues and lead by example to “green up our act.”
An overview of the issues and what ISTC (through its Sustainable Electronics Initiative) and other entities are doing on campus with regards to electronics involving education, research, and operations was explained by Joy Scrogum (SEI Co-Coordinator), who led the meeting, as well as possible activities and goals for this campus group. Attendees provided feedback on these suggestions, group structure, and themes for possible future smaller group meetings focusing on those three categories of research, education, and operations. ISTC/SEI will distribute minutes, make arrangements for the themed focus group meetings, and coordinate the sharing of information among those subgroups.
The result was a new Sustainable Electronics Campus Consortium which explored ways to address the issue. Present were engineers, faculty, administrators, students and participants from off-campus communities. Anyone interested in joining the Sustainable Electronics Campus Consortium talks can contact Joy Scrogum to be added to the email list of upcoming meetings and topics or visit the SEI Campus Consortium page.
Trash Into Treasure: New Advances in Upcycling Electronic Waste
Innovative companies are adding upcycling to their repertoire of materials reuse for electronic waste. Upcycling brings added quality or environmental value to things we throw away. ERS International develops and utilizes new technologies which allow them to obtain maximum recovery value of electronics via electrostatic separation & particle classification. But ERS has also made significant headway in this untapped field of upcycling. They have discovered how to conjunctionally reuse waste materials from other industries as well – such as natural stone waste.
At noon Thursday, Sept. 26, Jeff Mendez, Global Communications Director of ERS International will present “Recycling and Upcycling of Electronic Waste,” in the ISTC’s next “Sustainability in Action” seminar/webinar. The presentation will be broadcast live from Toronto, Canada and can be viewed at the Stephen J. Warner Conference Room at ISTC (One Hazelwood Dr., Champaign), or at Room 218 Mechanical Engineering Building at U of I (1206 W Green St. in Urbana).
The webinar will also be simulcast live by registering at https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/198927695. The presentation will also be archived on the ISTC website www.istc.illinois.edu for later viewing.
Engineer Introduces Thermally-Reversible Polymer to Desalination
According to water.org, 780 million people lack access to clean water. The need to provide access to clean water is one of the National Academy of Engineering’s Grand Challenges for Engineering.
At noon this Thursday, Sept 12, Dr. Xinying Wang will present “Polymer Assisted Forward Osmosis for Desalination and Water Reuse,” at U of I’s Mechanical Engineering Building, Rm. 218 (1206 W Green St. in Urbana, IL).
This webinar, as part of the ISTC’s Sustainable Technology Seminar Series “Sustainability in Action,” will be broadcast live and also archived on our website www.istc.illinois.edu for later viewing. If you cannot attend the event at Rm. 218 MEB, you may view the webinar live by registering at: https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/864226367. It will also be viewable live at the ISTC Conference Room at 1 Hazelwood Dr., Champaign, IL.
Dr. Wang is a Chemical Engineer at the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center, Prairie Research Institute. The following is his abstract for the seminar:
“Forward osmosis (FO) for dewatering/desalination applications has received increasing interest due to its potential use of low grade thermal energy, ability to operate at low pressure, and reduced tendency to foul. Developments in FO are primarily focused on two areas: (a) expanding the availability of draw solutions that generate high osmotic pressure; are easily separated from water using physical and/or chemical means; are non-corrosive, nontoxic, and chemically stable; exhibit near neutral pH; and are inexpensive and (b) developing membranes that exhibit high flux and suitable salt rejection under FO conditions. In this presentation we focus on the challenges of draw solution utilization and regeneration.
In this presentation, we will talk about a forward osmosis desalination process that employs a temperature-reversible polymer to recycle the draw solute. In our work, a high concentration MgSO4 solution is used as draw solution. After forward osmosis, the diluted draw solution is mixed with a thermally-reversible polymer, poly (propyleneoxide) –co-poly (ethyleneoxide). This polymer extracts water from the diluted draw solution and the whole solution forms two phases, a polymer-water phase and a concentrated MgSO4 solution phase (bottom). The bottom MgSO4 solution phase is recycled back to the forward osmosis module, while the polymer-water phase is heated above the polymer’s cloudy point (60⁰C) to recycle the polymer and to produce clean water. Experimental details on the process will be presented.”
Engineer to Share Latest Research for Recycling LCD Screens
Old TVs and monitors are becoming old TVs and monitors at record rates as screen size and new capabilities grow and prices shrink. Most of their toxins build up in landfills where they can leach into the environment. If it works sell it or donate it. If it doesn’t, check with a local repair shop to see if they will refurbish it. See if you can return it to the store where you purchased it, or watch for a recycling day from your local waste management service. Commercial electronics recyclers may charge you to drop off your old TV.
As researchers are constantly improving television technology they are also advancing technology for recycling their complex remains at the end of their lives. At noon this Thursday, Sept. 5, Dr. Fu Zhao, Associate Professor, School of Mechanical Engineering, Purdue University-West Lafayette will present “Recycling of Liquid Crystal Displays for Maximum Resource Recovery” as part of the ISTC’s Sustainable Technology Seminar Series “Sustainability in Action.”
Dr. Zhao will be speaking at ISTC with a live webinar of the presentation broadcast in Room 218 MEB). You can also register at: https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/428568375 to watch the broadcast live.
Here is Dr. Zhao’s abstract: “Hundreds of millions of liquid crystal displays (LCDs) will reach their end of life in the next few years, and most of them have cold cathode fluorescent lamps as the backlights. These mercury containing backlights bring challenges to the end of life treatment of LCDs. Communications with electronic waste recyclers indicate that recycling LCDs using available equipment and tools is not profitable in U.S. due to high equipment/labor cost. With the support of an EPA P3 Phase I grant, our team at Purdue University developed a four-step procedure for LCD disassembling. Appropriate tools for these steps have been designed and fabricated and the team was able to limit the total disassembling time to less than five minutes, the breakeven time suggested by e-waste recyclers. All the tools can be readily built using low-cost tools available on the market. The disassembling time can be shortened further after optimization. Toward the end of the talk, lessons learned from the project and challenges associated with developing sustainable electronic products will be discussed.”
2013 Naturally Illinois Expo
The Prairie Research Institute presents the fifth annual Naturally Illinois Expo on March 8-9, 2013, on the University of Illinois Urbana campus. Families, teachers, and students of all ages are invited to attend and enjoy exhibits, demonstrations and hands-on activities that showcase the work of the Institute, home of the State Scientific Surveys (Illinois Natural History Survey, Illinois State Archaeological Survey, Illinois State Geological Survey, Illinois State Water Survey, and Illinois Sustainable Technology Center). Continue reading “2013 Naturally Illinois Expo”
Sustainability Seminar Series: February 2013
ISTC will host two more seminars this month.
Continue reading “Sustainability Seminar Series: February 2013”