Study of Wastewater Treatment and Reuse in Urban Ag Receives Press in India

The Indian Express newspaper (link below) reports on a study in Hyderabad, India that identifies the linkages between urban agricultural practices, sewage treatment and reuse, carbon emissions and health. Network member Anu Ramaswami (University of Minnesota), Leslie MiIler-Robbie (University of Colorado, Denver) and Priyanie Amerasinghe (International Water Management Institute) collaborated on this study, recently published in the journal Environmental Research Letters (Link to article). The study finds that sewage treatment along with water reuse in urban agriculture can offer benefits to carbon mitigation and public health, although the public health benefits are less than expected due to farming practices and prior history of sewage-related soil pollution in the region.

Climate change: Untreated sewage major contributor in The New Indian Express

The carbon emission benefits of sewage treatment are large since untreated sewage discharged to rivers converts to methane which is a potent greenhouse gas. Untreated sewage and household waste, along with emissions from burning of petrol and diesel in cars, and coal to provide electricity are among the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions in cities.

Sara Meerow and Joshua Newell’s paper on Defining Urban Resilience wins the 2016 Weddle Prize

Congratulations to our SRN members, Sara Meerow and Josh Newell, who have won Landscape & Urban Planning’s third annual Weddle Prize. Their paper examines the definition and usage of urban resilience and proposes an updated definition for the future. The award is given to papers where a student served as lead author and the paper exemplified “rigorous scholarship that aims to achieve environmentally and socially beneficial design or planning of landscapes.”

Sara Meerow, Joshua P. Newell, and Melissa Stults. 2016. Defining urban resilience: A review. Landscape and Urban Planning V 147. The full paper is available here.

Kara Kockelman part of UT Austin team to address U.S. transportation challenges

The Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin is one of four institutions selected by the National Science Foundation to partner with government agencies and private companies to tackle the nation’s most pressing transportation challenges.

UT Austin has joined the NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) for Efficient Vehicles and Sustainable Transportation Systems (EV-STS), established to support efforts by the automotive and ground transportation industries to meet federal regulations governing vehicle fuel economy and emissions, as well as to meet society’s expectations for improved sustainability. The University of Louisville and Arizona State University established the EV-STS center in 2016, and UT Austin and the University of Alabama joined this year.

“This center will create valuable links across disciplines in the Cockrell School as well as across U.S. universities doing research on efficient vehicles and transportation systems,” said Ron Matthews, mechanical engineering professor and the UT Austin center’s EV-STS site director. “It will also give us the opportunity to leverage our industry partners in both the private and public sectors.”

UT Austin will receive a four-year grant for $600,000 from NSF. That funding will grow with the involvement of government and corporate partners, with membership to the center starting at $50,000 per year. The UT Austin center will be working with at least six corporate and government partners.

One of the center’s priorities is to make ground-based vehicles, everything from motorcycles to 18-wheelers, more fuel-efficient and sustainable. The Cockrell School has one of the top engine research programs in the country, with expertise in improving fuel efficiency, decreasing emissions and using alternative fuels, Matthews said.

The researchers’ work will also include the development and analysis of electric vehicle powertrains, including quantifying cost, emissions and other impacts of large-scale electric bus fleets for transit agencies. They will also address issues concerning conventional powertrains, including real-world fuel economy and CO2 emissions.

Additionally, UT Austin is one of a handful of universities with the expertise to simulate shared autonomous vehicles — anything from buses to fleets of cars — serving cities, regions and inter-city travel. The center will give UT Austin researchers the opportunity to flex their expertise in forecasting the nation’s fleet evolution and its energy emissions and greenhouse gas impacts under different demographic, fuel-cost and technology-pricing scenarios. Some of their work has already shed light on the energy implications of the nation’s transportation choices.

Along with Matthews, Kara Kockelman, professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, will lead the EV-STS center as associate site director. Co-investigators in the center include Matthew Hall, professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering; Thomas Hughes, professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics; and Michael Lewis, senior engineering scientist in the Cockrell School’s Center for Electromechanics.

Kockelman said that the center will benefit UT Austin in multiple ways, from giving researchers the chance to work closely with industry on solving real-world problems to introducing students to potential career paths.

“It will enable our research to be implemented sooner and educate multiple industry partners in related disciplines,” she said. “It will also educate our students and help connect them directly to partners that may be employing them upon graduation.”

Professor Lutgarde Raskin wins the ISME/IWA Biocluster Award Grand Prize

Congratulations to SRN member, Professor Lutgarde Raskin, who has won the ISME/IWA Biocluster Award Grand Prize in 2016. This prestigious prize rewards interdisciplinary research at the interface of microbial ecology and water/wastewater treatment.

Rahul Sharma and Professor Gabe Chan Provide Commentary for Nature Energy

Read University of Minnesota PhD Rahul Sharma and Professor Gabe Chan’s invited commentary in Nature Energy, “Energy poverty: Electrification and well-being.” The commentary is based on a paper Sharma and Chan reviewed for the journal, and engages with questions on how rural energy poverty is measured, and which measures are better suited for policy decisions.

Professor Ramaswami Interviewed by John Batchelor Show

June 2, 2016

The recently commentary in Science by SRN Professors, Anu Ramaswami, Patricia Culligan, and Ted Russell prompted The John Batchelor Show to interview Ramaswami on what it means to develop smart, sustainable, and healthy cities.

To access the interview, go to AudioBoom.

PIs Ramaswami, Russell, and Culligan co-author commentary in Science on smart sustainable healthy cities

“We must move beyond data to the systems-level decisions that we as a society must make to transition toward a smart, sustainable, and healthy urban future,” says SRN lead PI Anu Ramaswami, who led a commentary on the subject published in the special urban issue of the journal Science. 

In January, the University of Minnesota and ICLEI: Local Governments for Sustainability brought together faculty, students, and policymakers from the U.S., China, and India for a workshop on sustainable cities. Inspiration for this paper was a result of that workshop.

In the commentary, SRN faculty Ramaswami (University of Minnesota), Armistead Russell (Georgia Institute of Technology), and Patricia Culligan (Columbia University), along with Mr Emani Kumar (ICLEI South Asia) outline eight basic principles for transforming cities that apply across the world, and resonate with local partners.

One principle focuses on providing basic infrastructure for all, especially in cities where 30-40 percent of the population lives in slums.

The authors cite a few examples already underway: In India, where cities face problems with water scarcity and access in slum areas, ATMs (automatic teller machines) that dispense fresh water are being piloted. Cities in China are exploring “fit-for-purpose” water reuse supply to homes.

It’s not enough for individual cities to develop these smart technologies on their own. Most urban areas get the vast majority of their energy, water, building materials, and food from beyond their boundaries, so developing cleaner and more efficient systems for supplying these goods and services is critical.

SRN PI’s collaborated with ICLEI in the development of footprinting tools that cities can use to measure their energy and water consumption, and then use that data to better understand their impacts on the environment within and outside their boundaries.

Brian Holland (ICLEI USA): “This research is making an important contribution to the growing movement of sustainable and low-carbon cities.  In particular, the emerging approaches to footprinting local environmental and health outcomes across sectors and scales aligns well with the widely-used standards for city-scale GHG accounting we’ve developed with our partners and stakeholders.”

Another guiding principle is to pursue urban health improvements at different scales—from the home, to the neighborhood, to regional pollution, to climate extremes—while recognizing the inequities among residents.  Many U.S. cities are undertaking community-based health planning with a focus on climate events such as extreme heat and cold, and how they might impact vulnerable populations differently.

The authors also recommend the integration of large infrastructure systems with smaller-scale, local systems such as urban farms, community solar gardens, and district energy systems.

Interdisciplinary and Multi-institution Collaboration

The principles and recommendations are the results of insights developed from two large multi-institution grants supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, which are both led by professor Ramaswami.

The Sustainability Research Network (SRN) on Sustainable Healthy Cities is a network of scientists, industry leaders, and policy partners, committed to building better cities of the future through innovations in infrastructure design, technology and policy. The network connects across nine research universities, major metropolitan cities in the U.S. and India, as well as infrastructure firms, and policy groups.

The Partnership for International Research and Education (PIRE), a collaboration of the University of Minnesota, Yale, Georgia Tech, and four universities in India and China, developed an international and interdisciplinary curriculum. The project connects study tours with research and outreach, and allows for deep engagement with nonprofit government organizations and policymakers from the U.S., China, and India. The workshop mentioned earlier was the culmination of one such tour of various cities in India and China to study how those cities were transforming their infrastructure to meet future needs.

The special issue of Science can be found here: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/rise-urban-planet

Minnesota Researcher Finds that Emissions from On-road Vehicles in Delhi are Increasing

Researchers Ajay Nagpure, post doctorate associate at the University of Minnesota, B. R Gurjar and Vivek Kumar from IIT-Roorkee, and Prashant Kumar from University of Surrey carried out a study aimed at recording variations in various vehicular pollutants over the span of 20 years and also give future projections.

Read the full article posted in the Times of India or a similar article in The Economic Times.

The Cleanest Cities? It’s Not So Simple

University of Minnesota professor and SRN director, Anu Ramaswami, is quoted in a New York Times article on the variety of ways to assess a city’s efficiency when it comes to energy and impact on the environment.

Minnesota and Georgia Tech Collaborate on Pollution Threat to Taj Mahal

A joint study by the University of Minnesota and Georgia Institute of Technology addresses the high level of particulate matter responsible for masking the white marble sheen of the Taj Mahal.

Read the articles:

• Times of India –  Large-scale open burning of garbage damaging Taj: US study
• Wall Street Journal – How Trash Is Adding to Delhi’s Air Pollution Problems
• Times of India – Police lathicharge on colleagues’ kin for protesting against burning of garbage