WMREI Financial Assistance
Helps Students Chart Careers
by Lori Phan
Each year, the Waste Management Research and Education Institute (WMREI) at The University of Tennessee (UT) awards $50,000 in scholarships, fellowships, and stipends for graduate and undergraduate students pursuing degrees in fields related to waste management.
Among WMREI's annual financial awards are three graduate fellowships offered to UT doctoral students whose research focuses on waste management. Fellowship recipients are awarded $12,000 stipends plus remission of fees and a supplies/travel allowance of $1,000.
In the past seven years, the 17 fellowship recipients have come from such diverse fields as economics, engineering, geography, microbiology, and political science. Recipients typically are pursuing research related to the physical sciences, engineering, or the policy aspects of waste management.
The three recipients of this year's fellowships are Jeff Leblond (microbiology), Christine Kelly (chemical engineering), and Kelly Tiller (agricultural economics).
WMREI Director Gary Sayler says the purpose of the fellowships is twofold.
"First, we want to provide students with the financial support necessary to allow them to focus their energy and creativity on research topics in waste management," he says. "And second, we want to attract top-notch students to waste-management research here at UT."
In an attempt to do just that, WMREI recently began a new program that offers three to five stipends valued at $3,000 each to selected doctoral students studying waste management and who are also working as graduate research and teaching assistants.
The stipends are meant to supplement the income doctoral students earn through assistantship positions. This year, department heads from civil and environmental engineering, economics, geography, microbiology, and sociology were given the opportunity to recommend a stipend recipient.
WMREI also recently awarded a $1,500 scholarship to Kathryn Teresa Moore, a senior majoring in civil and environmental engineering at UT. Moore will graduate in May of 1996.
WMREI awarded the scholarship on behalf of the Oak Ridge Waste Management Association (ORWMA), an alliance of more than 100 East Tennessee organizations whose focus falls on waste-management issues.
This is the fourth year WMREI has awarded the scholarship, which goes to a UT incoming junior or senior studying the technical or scientific aspects of waste management.
According to Mary English, WMREI senior fellow and the chairperson of the selection committee, the scholarship is awarded based on both merit and career goals.
For information on these assistance programs contact Gail Farris, The University of Tennessee, WMREI, 311 Conference Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, or call 865-974-4251.
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Setting Sail for Science
For one researcher, a Pacific cruise means sampling the
ocean's carbon-dioxide level rather than savoring its bounty.
by Dana Williams
To most folks, a six-week cruise on the Pacific would seem like the ultimate vacation. But to Alex Kozyr, a researcher for The University of Tennessee's Energy, Environment, and Resources Center and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, it seemed a lot more like work.
Last winter, Kozyr left his Oak Ridge, Tennessee, office, where he conducts research for the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC), to join a group of scientists in Fremantle, Australia. There, on January 24, they boarded the research vessel Knorr to spend the following six weeks collecting data that will help scientists better understand how the oceans interact with the atmosphere and shape world weather patterns.
The task was not new to Kozyr. The seasoned oceanographer from Ukraine had participated in 15 data-collection cruises sponsored by the former Soviet Union. He has worked for CDIAC since 1993.
The Pacific voyage was part of a worldwide study of global ocean circulation by the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE). Throughout the 1990s, WOCE will pool the efforts of scientists from 40 nations in an unprecedented collection of data related to the ocean's physical properties.
"The world's oceans play a dynamic role in shaping the Earth's climate," says Kozyr, "but we're only beginning to understand the complexities of this role."
The ocean, for instance, absorbs energy from the atmosphere, transports it in currents, and releases it at points far removed by time and distance. This process affects the circulation of heat and moisture in the atmosphere and thus influences the world's weather and climatic patterns.
Evidence suggests, however, that human activities have altered these natural circulation patterns. Since the industrial revolution, and especially in the last 30 years, the burning of fossil fuels has increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 25 percent.
Unfortunately, our ability to understand and predict our impacts on climate patterns has not yet evolved to an exact science. Studies are often based on computer models that may or may not render accurate results.
"One of the most important gaps in our knowledge of climatic patterns involves how natural processes may mitigate a global-warming process," says Kozyr. "For instance, the oceans play a critical role in the absorption of carbon dioxide as well as heat, and there is a constant exchange of carbon dioxide between the ocean and the atmosphere."
Preliminary studies have shown that some areas of the ocean release carbon dioxide, while other areas absorb the gas. Whether or not the balance is in favor of carbon dioxide absorption has yet to be determined.
With the Earth's future climate at stake, understanding the dynamic relationship between the oceans and the atmosphere has become critical and represents an enormous undertaking.
During the WOCE study, scientists will employ satellites, research ships, and thousands of instruments to collect the data necessary to significantly improve models of ocean circulation.
Research teams on vessels such as the Knorr measure the ocean's temperature, salinity, density, distribution of carbon dioxide and other gases, and other variables to complete "numeric data packages" that describe the billions of bits of data accumulated during the cruises.
Prior to departure, the Knorr's chief scientist established coordinates that represented 130 testing stations where the ship would stop to allow scientists to take water samples from as deep as 20,000 feet.
Scientists aboard the Knorr routinely logged 12-hour shifts and had little opportunity for recreation. When there was time for fun, Kozyr and the crew devised ways to play, rather than work, in the water.
"We used equipment boxes and a tarp to build a 10-foot-square 'swimming' pool on deck and rigged a pump to circulate ocean water through it," he says.
The social event of the cruise was the "Neptune Holiday," a day of initiation for the 15 or so "polliwogs" who had never crossed the equator at sea. After being awakened at 6 a.m., the polliwogs suffered a day of all-in-good-fun abuse by the veteran "shellbacks."
The Knorr ended its mission in Sri Lanka, where its passengers set foot on land for the first time since leaving Australia six weeks earlier.
Now back home, Kozyr finds his work far from complete. The large quantity of data collected on the cruise requires extensive compilation, analysis, and quality control, which takes a team of researchers as long as two years to complete.
The end result will be data packages from the cruise, which will ultimately be combined with data packages from other Pacific cruises as well as research cruises conducted in other parts of the world. Together they will help form a complete picture of ocean dynamics.
For more information, contact Alex Kozyr, ORNL, Carbon Dioxide
Information Analysis Center, P.O. Box 2008, Oak Ridge, TN
37831-6335, or call (423) 574-0390.
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Waste Not, Treat Not
UT researchers help DOE spread the word that, where pollution
is concerned, an ounce of prevention is worth tons of remediation.
by Lori Phan
The United States makes up only 5 percent of the global population, yet it creates roughly 20 percent of the world's waste. And much of it ends up clogging our nation's landfills.
To battle this growing problem, the Department of Energy (DOE) has turned to pollution prevention, an environmental strategy based on the simplest of premises: If you don't create waste in the first place, you don't have to find a way to dispose of it later.
DOE hammered the message home at its 11th annual pollution-prevention conference titled "Shaping the Future through Pollution Prevention: Involvement, Commitment, and Progress," held in Knoxville this past May.
The University of Tennessee's Center for Clean Products and Clean Technologies (CCPCT) and the Energy, Environment, and Resources Center (EERC), both affiliate organizations of the Waste Management Research and Education Institute, participated in the conference, which drew more than 500 people.
Among the participants were representatives from DOE and its contractors, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), private industry, and academia.
The conference featured the perspectives of more than 100 pollution-prevention experts, including UT representatives Gary Davis and Bruce Clemens. It also featured a screening of the EERC Communication Office's film Solid Solutions.
Davis, director of CCPCT, made a presentation to a meeting of the Tennessee Pollution Prevention Partnership (TP3), which was held in conjunction with the conference.
TP3 is an alliance of Tennessee individuals interested in promoting pollution prevention in the state. Among its 64 members are waste managers, researchers, policy- makers, and industry representatives drawn from Central and East Tennessee.
While the alliance's goal is pollution prevention, its strategy is collaboration. Indeed, at its quarterly meetings, the organization seeks to establish a forum through which those involved in pollution prevention can share ideas regarding research, training, and technical and financial assistance.
Davis's presentation explored the principle of extended-producer responsibility. This new pollution-prevention strategy focuses on the products' environmental impacts through their entire life cycles, beginning with the extraction of raw materials used in their creation and ending with the products' ultimate disposal.
Currently, many pollution-prevention strategies are limited in focus to the manufacturing process alone, ignoring the environmental effects of the product's use and disposal as well as the processes involved in refining the materials that go into it.
For instance, while the use and disposal of polystyrene--better known as Styrofoam--are relatively environmentally benign (except for the landfill space it occupies), the processes used to produce the substances from which the product is made are not. In fact, says Davis, the petrochemical refining process that produces the materials used to make polystyrene results in large releases of toluene, benzene, and other toxic organic compounds.
"In the 1990s it has become apparent that reducing pollutants from manufacturing processes alone is not enough to solve our persistent pollution problems or to move us toward sustainable development," Davis says. "To be more responsible, producers should look at every stage of the product's life to identify opportunities to prevent pollution and to reduce resource and energy use."
According to Davis, one of the world's most visible extended-producer-responsibility policies is embodied in the German Packaging Ordinance, which requires German product distributors to take back their products' packages for recycling and disposal.
Similar requirements have been proposed for the German automotive industry, which is attempting to preempt the mandate by agreeing to take back automobiles at the end of their useful lives and recycle their parts.
Also at the May pollution-prevention conference, EERC Senior Research Associate Bruce Clemens explored DOE's potential for reducing its drain on both the national budget and the U.S. resource base by recycling its huge stockpile of radioactive scrap metals. Currently, DOE possesses more than 200,000 tons of the scrap.
Clemens focused on commitment of four stakeholder groups--including DOE, other federal and state agencies, public interest groups, and the private sector--to a DOE program titled "Recycle 2000." Through the program, DOE hopes by 2000 to use radiation-contaminated metals to manufacture canisters that will store up to 50 percent of DOE's radioactive wastes.
"Currently, DOE has thousands of tons of radioactive-scrap metal," he says. "If the department could recycle that metal and use it for the storage of radioactive waste rather than create containment barrels from virgin metals, the U.S. would do its part for recycling. It would also significantly reduce the amount of radioactive scrap it would have to dispose of."
For more information, contact Gary Davis or Bruce Clemens, University of Tennessee, EERC, 311 Conference Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, or call (423) 974-4251.
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Teaching Trash to Tennessee's School Children
WMREI is helping Tennessee provide solid-waste-management
education to its youngest citizens and their teachers.
by Lori Phan
Each year, Tennessee generates about 5 million tons of solid waste, and 90 percent of it winds up in the state's landfills. To combat this "discard-then-disregard" pattern, the Waste Management Research and Education Institute (WMREI) of The University of Tennessee (UT) has teamed up with the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) to educate the youngest of Tennessee's citizens.
WMREI recently received a $132,000 grant from TDEC to develop a solid-waste-management education program that will complement the state's ongoing environmental education program mandated by the Tennessee Solid Waste Management Act of 1991.
The new program, the Tennessee Solid Waste Education Program (TN SWEP), targets grades K-12 and will be integrated into many components of classroom education, including art, history, health, science, and civics. The program will be implemented in Tennessee schools this fall.
Rosalyn McKeown-Ice, director of UT's Center for Geography and Environmental Education (CGEE), will co-direct the project with Catherine Wilt, a research associate at UT's Energy, Environment, and Resources Center (EERC). Both CGEE and EERC are affiliate organizations of WMREI.
McKeown-Ice and Wilt spent the summer sifting through materials from environmental-education curricula that have already been implemented nationwide.
Their goal was to borrow from these successful programs in compiling the best environmental-education curriculum possible. In instances where no useful models existed, McKeown-Ice and Wilt designed lesson plans on their own.
According to McKeown-Ice, the program's primary goal involves demonstrating to students the effects of their actions--both positive and negative--on Tennessee's solid-waste problems.
"We can no longer suggest to students that all they need to do to address Tennessee's solid-waste problems is to recycle," she says. "An integrated curriculum--one that melds many techniques for achieving environmental protection, waste management, and pollution prevention--is essential."
Through the program, students will learn about waste reduction and reuse, recycling, and composting. They will learn about incineration techniques that recapture and reuse the energy produced through combustion and processes devised to capture the methane produced as organic matter decomposes in landfills. The students will also learn what each technique involves and what combinations are workable for their own communities.
Though the program boasts these overarching goals, it will be presented in the following four modules, which target children at various stages in their K-12 educations:
Grades K-3. Children in kindergarten through
third grade will learn how to reduce the quantity of things they now toss
into the trash, a process known as source-reduction, and to recycle
containers for products they do use.
They will learn what items their communities recycle and how to spot these recyclable items in the store.
"They will learn, for instance, to identify recycling symbols by flipping a plastic container like a detergent or soda bottle upside-down to read the recycling mark," says Wilt.
These children may also use a plastic milk jug as a model landfill to learn that apple cores and bread crumbs degrade while plastic spoons do not.
Grades 4-5. Fourth- and fifth-graders will gain knowledge of
the natural and social processes that underlie environmental
problems. Their focus will shift from simply identifying
environmental problems to actually acknowledging that human
actions have both positive and negative effects on the
environment. Building on their awareness of environmental
problems, the students will examine such problems scientifically.
For instance, whereas the lower grades might learn that improper disposal of oil is bad for the environment, fourth and fifth graders will observe, firsthand, why it's harmful. To acquire that awareness, they might pour oil into a jug of water to see that the oil doesn't dissolve. They might dip a feather in the oil to learn the effect oil spills have on birds. Or they might pour oil into soil and observe how it clings to each grain and can't be flushed out with rainwater.
These students will also delve deeper into the humanities and social-science disciplines like art, history, and geography to discover some environmentally benign habits of the generations that preceded them.
They might, for instance, learn in an art lesson how to make a new piece of paper for painting or drawing out of scraps of used paper. As they do, they--like the Aborigines who once harvested and prepared bark for their paintings--will take part in preparing their own artistic media.
Or the students might travel back in time via a history lesson to explore how their grandparents recycled materials like aluminum foil and rags for the war effort in the 1940s.
Grades 6-8. Middle school students will develop the skills
necessary for analyzing complex environmental issues and
policies.
They will learn, for instance, to identify the key players who shape environmental policy in their communities. They will analyze environmental issues like water and air pollution and explore what's at stake for various interest groups.
"Ultimately, they will ask themselves why certain participants are inclined to take certain actions," says McKeown-Ice. "Are they motivated by ecological, political, economic, or social/cultural reasons?"
These students may visit a composting facility and then use a two-liter soda bottle to make their own compost columns. They will also learn whom to contact for information on solid-waste management in their communities.
Grades 9-12. High-school students will focus primarily on
community research. They might, for instance, conduct a waste
audit of their schools, trying to discover how much trash their
schools produce in a single day.
And by conducting neighborhood surveys, they'll find out if the members of their communities support recycling programs and if they understand how their purchasing decisions affect the amount of solid waste generated locally.
"Students will be looking at the wastes they generate and at the consumption patterns of their families and their communities," Wilt explains. "They'll analyze what their communities are throwing away and learn what could have been reduced, reused, and recycled."
Once students complete their surveys and tabulate their results, they'll identify actions they can take--like making better purchasing decisions or encouraging community members to recycle--to improve their communities' solid-waste-management profiles.
Wilt contends that this school-system-wide approach to environmental education will help improve waste-management practices today as well as in the future.
"In part, our mission involves educating a new generation of responsible citizens and responsible stewards of the earth," she says. "We must also assist in creating the next generation of environmental professionals and leaders."
McKeown-Ice and Wilt welcome all Tennessee schools interested in participating in the project, which targets Tennessee's three grand divisions: West, Middle, and East Tennessee.
WMREI has hired one education specialist for each of the state's divisions based on his or her success at teaching and participation in in-service training.
These teacher trainers will visit schools in their divisions to deliver guest lectures and provide teachers with lesson plans. The trainers will also provide in-service training for K-12 teachers to inform them about curriculum materials available to them.
Although the program is at an early stage of development, McKeown-Ice is enthusiastic about its potential.
"This is an empowering program that offers students hands-on experience," she says. "In the end, we hope to create a voting citizenry that acts--as well as thinks--in environmentally responsible ways."
For more information, contact Rosalyn McKeown-Ice or Catherine Wilt, The University of Tennessee, WMREI, 311 Conference Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, or call (423) 974-4251.
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Communities as Classrooms
by Lori Phan
This past summer, the University of Tennessee's (UT) Center for Geography and Environmental Education (CGEE), an affiliate organization of the Waste Management Research and Education Institute (WMREI), conducted a workshop for 15 U.S. and 16 Russian teachers of grades four through nine.
The Russian guests arrived from Rostov Oblov, a city situated between Ukraine and Georgia in the southwest portion of Russia, while the American participants hailed from the Tennessee Valley.
The Rostov Region of Russia and the Tennessee Valley both form watersheds for national river systems and boast leading educational institutions. Educators from these regions agreed to participate in a sister-region exchange program that began in 1991.
The three-week workshop, which was part of the exchange program, focused on "community investigation," an approach to education through which teachers invite their students to abandon chalkboards and textbooks and instead explore their communities and immerse themselves in the laboratory of real life.
While conducting community investigations, students examine biological, physical, and cultural components of the surrounding environments, including houses, rivers, vegetation, and people.
"This exploration offers a multi-disciplinary approach to learning," says CGEE Director Rosalyn McKeown-Ice, who helped develop the community investigation program. "While exploring their neighborhoods, students can learn history, art, math, and science."
For example, while studying the structures of houses and buildings, students observe the fundamentals of architecture. They learn geometry from the shapes of the windows, doors, roofs, and eaves. And they apply arithmetic in tabulating the number of tiles or bricks used to create a building.
These students delve into the natural sciences by exploring the types of building materials used and by pondering why the builders chose those materials over others.
A geography lesson might prompt students to investigate why a house is situated beside a river or set on rolling pasturelands. How does the house affect the water quality of the river? What hints does location offer about the likely occupation of a house's inhabitants?
The children record their discoveries in journals and on sketch pads. They draw maps, pictures, charts, and graphs to illustrate physical, economic, and cultural aspects of their surroundings. The children then share their language-friendly visuals with their counterparts in their sister region.
"Through the program, Russian and American students learn to appreciate their own cultures, environments, and environmental problems," says McKeown-Ice. "And, because of a new friendship between students in such distant nations, they'll also be able to enjoy and explore another culture from across the world."
McKeown-Ice anticipates that the exchange program will help foster "a cooperative spirit between the teachers and students of two nations to study and collaborate toward resolving their environmental problems."
The exchange program will continue next summer, when Rostov Oblov will welcome Tennessee Valley teachers to a workshop on water quality and biological and ecological sciences.
For more information, contact Rosalyn McKeown-Ice, The University of Tennessee, CGEE, 311 Conference Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, or call (423) 974-4251.
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Staff Citings
Appointments
Daniel Schaffer was named to the editorial board of Corporate Environmental Strategy: The Journal of Environmental Leadership. In June, Schaffer spoke at the Environmental Management Strategy Forum at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on "The Role of Nonscience in Science."Jonathan Rubin has been appointed to the Alternative Transportation Fuels Subcommittee of the National Research Council's Transportation Research Board.
Mary English accepted an appointment to the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Research
Ralph Perhac is collaborating with researchers from the Joint Institute for Energy and Environment and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) on a project that aims to quantify--in effect, to assign a dollar value to--programs sponsored by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR). The ATSDR, an agency mandated by Superfund legislation, seeks, among other things, to reduce risk, improve human health, and promote environmental equity at Superfund sites.
New Contracts
The Pellissippi Research Institute (PRI), a joint venture of the Energy, Environment, and Resources Center and the Transportation Center, recently signed a contract with the Energy Division of ORNL for more than $19 million.
Presentations
Dean Menke presented "Demonstration of Alternatives to Vapor Degreasing" at the Risk Reduction Engineering Laboratory Symposium held in Cincinnati this past April.Ted May presented "Population Education: Meeting the New Geography Standards" at the Tennessee Council for the Social Sciences Conference in April in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.
Publications/Productions
Catherine Wilt published the chapter "The 'Civil War' of Waste: Who Will Ultimately Control the Transport of Solid Waste?" in a book titled Public Works Administration: Modern Public Policy Perspectives.Barry L. Shumpert co-wrote and co-produced "An Introduction to Protective Action Decision Making," a 30-minute training videotape for the U.S. Army and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
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