InSites is a quarterly newsletter that highlights the personalities and projects of the Waste Management Research and Education Institute (WMREI) of The University of Tennessee. WMREI is an affiliate of the EERC.
WMREI was created in 1985 as a state-funded Center of Excellence. Research areas include solid-, hazardous-, and nuclear-waste management; waste minimization; and pollution prevention.
Biotechnology is the focal point of the institute's technical research, while issues
involving public attitudes and federal/state policies related to waste-management issues
are the primary concerns of the institute's policy research.
For additional information about InSites, or to be added to our mailing list, please write InSites, WMREI, The University of Tennessee, 311 Conference Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, call 865-974-1156, or fax 865-974-1838. Or, if you prefer, e-mail Constance Griffith
cbgriffith@utk.edu.
WMREI's Policy Director Takes Research Center Helm, by David BrillRein-CAR-nation, German Style, by Marilyn MorganChemical Problems, Chemical Solutions, by Dana KanskyUT's International Exchange Program..., by Linda MoistStaff Citing
Jack N. Barkenbus has been appointed director of the University of Tennessee's (UT) Energy, Environment, and Resources Center (EERC), a multidisciplinary research organization awarded more than $10 million in research contracts in 1994.
Barkenbus, who has served as the EERC's acting director since 1991, is also director of policy for the Waste Management Research and Education Institute (WMREI), an affiliate organization of the EERC.
Barkenbus becomes the EERC's fourth director since the organization's inception in 1973. Among Barkenbus' predecessors are John Gibbons, former director of the U.S. Congress' Office of Technology Assessment and current science advisor to President Bill Clinton, and E. William Colglazier, who now serves as executive officer for the National Academy of Sciences.
Before joining the EERC in 1987 as a deputy director, Barkenbus served as senior scientist and deputy director for the Institute for Energy Analysis at Oak Ridge Associated Universities. In that capacity, he spearheaded several projects exploring such issues as arms control, state energy planning, and the future of nuclear power. He also edited or co-authored five books on those subjects.
Barkenbus, who holds a doctorate in international studies from the University of Denver, has served as a research political scientist with the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and as a researcher with the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego.
According to Lee L. Riedinger, UT's acting associate vice-chancellor for research, Barkenbus was appointed EERC director in part because of his broad policy background and his proven ability to anticipate and shift his research focus with the changing times.
"The emphases of the EERC have changed appreciably over the organization's two decades of operation to reflect the evolution of our society and its ever-changing reliance on research," says Riedinger. "Jack Barkenbus is uniquely qualified to lead this continuing evolution while ensuring an increasing emphasis on quality research."
During Barkenbus' three years as acting director, EERC's annual awards levels have risen from $6 million to $10 million. Barkenbus ascribes the growth in funding to the capability, dedication, and initiative of his diversified staff of more than 225 employees boasting backgrounds in such areas as political science, engineering, sociology, risk assessment, communications, computer sciences, and geography.
"We're fortunate to have a staff of self-starters here at EERC," says Barkenbus. "Though I let researchers know which research areas are important to the center, I'm also willing to let them
develop ideas that reflect their own interests."
Afforded such freedom under Barkenbus' direction, EERC staff has developed programs that explore such themes as stakeholder involvement and public participation, pollution prevention through the design of cleaner products and manufacturing processes, and development of information and computer-based products.
"The challenge I face as director of EERC is to create a unified organization," Barkenbus says, "while empowering individual researchers to develop new research emphases and relationships." In terms of the potential for future relationships and new research links, Barkenbus' vision falls both inside and outside the University of Tennessee. For instance, he is eager to see the EERC become better integrated in campus activities both in interdisciplinary research as well as in classroom instruction.
Beyond the university's walls, Barkenbus sees potential for international collaboration in such key areas as global climate change, environmental regulation under the North American Free-Trade Agreement, pollution prevention, and sustainable development.
He also recognizes the potential inherent in the nation's shifting environmental regulatory framework, which he sees moving away from command-and-control strictures of the past to more voluntary market-based approaches.
"Government and industry relations are changing in a way that makes it clear that partnerships are in and adversarial relationships are out," he says. "Because of EERC's affiliation with the university and its high level of objectivity, it possesses the qualities for providing credible third-party monitoring that will tell us if the revised regulatory approach is really working to the benefit of American society."
But regardless of where EERC's future research path leads, Barkenbus insists that the organization must maintain its integrity and research precision while resisting the temptation to become too closely linked to any one sponsor.
"It's easy in the short term to become popular by telling a corporation or other sponsor what it wants to hear," Barkenbus says. "But such lack of academic rigor will eventually compromise an organization's credibility.
"We have to maintain an element of surprise here," he continues. "And that means we have to be willing to follow the facts--and our future--wherever they lead."
The end of the line for America's cars generally means being either shredded for their steel or being left to rust in salvage yards. But in Germany, auto executives are devising a more farsighted strategy for dealing with old clunkers: They want to make sure that every car gets recycled at the end of its life.
Though most of the work in automobile recycling has been done in Europe, especially in Germany, automakers in the United States and Japan now want to catch up with the Germans for economic as well as environmental reasons: If they're to compete in the new global marketplace, they must comply with environmental laws in the countries in which they hope to sell their cars.
Lori Kincaid, technical program manager for UT's Center for Clean Products and Clean Technologies (CCPCT), is working to spread knowledge about automobile recycling programs. She traveled to Germany three years ago to study programs there (see InSites, Spring 1993). More recently, the Center received a grant from Saturn Corporation to conduct research for preliminary benchmarking of vehicle recycling programs in the United States and Japan.
Benchmarking enables researchers to pinpoint the best available technology, apply that technology to the production process, then measure the technology against other, newer technologies as they evolve.
"Companies interested in improving products' environmental performance need benchmarks to track their progress," Kincaid says. "Benchmarks tell us where we've been, where we are, and how far we have to go."
In Germany, a proposed law would require manufacturers to take back their vehicles at the end of their useful lifetimes and set goals for recycling the materials into new cars. Among the strategies under consideration is designing cars to be disassembled instead of crushed and shredded so that the pieces can be more easily recycled.
"Sometimes economic issues are more difficult to resolve than technical ones," Kincaid says. For example, cars would be easier to recycle if they had fewer coats of paint, but, Kincaid notes, "consumers like their cars to have a high- gloss finish."
Consumer preference will certainly influence the ways cars are designed and built in the future, but so will environmental concerns and the increasing economic interdependence among nations. U.S. automobile companies are not required to take their cars back at the end of their lifespans as German companies soon may be. Nor must they collect and recycle individual parts as Japanese companies already do with bumpers.
But if U.S. automakers want to compete successfully in the global marketplace, they must devise strategies to help them meet the most stringent environmental standards that exist. International benchmarking programs can help them to do that.
For more information contact Lori Kincaid, Center for Clean Products and Clean Technologies, University of Tennessee, 311 Conference Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-41346 or call 865-974-8979.
Through our lives we come into contact with countless chemicals. Some represent risks to our health and the quality of our environment, while others are harmless. Despite these enormous variations, there is no standardized and accessible system for classifying chemicals according to their toxicity or other harmful characteristics.
Chemical manufacturers, government regulators, university researchers, and environmental activists have independently developed more than 100 chemical ranking-and-scoring (CRS) systems. But as valuable as these individual systems are, they attack the problem of chemical toxicity in a piecemeal fashion and offer little guidance or consensus for developing uniform ranking-and-scoring methods.
Consequently, widely variable methods produce inconsistent results. This contributes to duplicated efforts and lack of confidence in the results.
A more standardized system for ranking and scoring chemicals may be on the horizon, however, thanks in part to the efforts of researchers Gary Davis and Mary Swanson of The University of Tennessee's (UT) Waste Management Research and Education Institute (WMREI). Davis serves as director of WMREI's Center for Clean Products and Clean Technologies, and Mary Swanson is a senior research associate with UT's Energy, Environment, and Resources Center, a WMREI affiliate organization.
Davis and Swanson were instrumental in organizing a six-day workshop on chemical ranking and scoring held this past February in Destin, Florida.
The workshop's sponsor, the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC), is a professional society of 3,300 environmental professionals drawn from government, academia, industry, and the environmental community.
Among their other tasks, Davis and Swanson formed a steering committee of representatives of the chemical industry, EPA officials, state officials, and environmental groups. The committee then organized working groups, developed a workshop agenda, distributed background materials, and raised funds.
After a year of planning, the committee welcomed 50 environmental experts from Austria, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, South Korea, and the United States.
CRS is an important tool for protecting human health and the environment from harmful levels of exposure to toxic chemicals.
Currently, use of CRSs is most prevalent among the chemical industry and government regulatory agencies, such as the EPA.
Regulators use CRS to develop lists of chemicals that should be monitored, controlled, or banned entirely. For example, they maintain lists of chemicals that may threaten the water quality of lakes and rivers. Their goal: to monitor and control the presence and amounts of these chemicals.
Regulators also use CRS systems to prioritize chemicals for detailed evaluations of the hazards they cause, giving higher priority to those chemicals that possess the most harmful properties.
Regulators may also rank chemicals to help them focus their regulatory efforts. For instance, if a factory routinely releases several chemicals into a community stream and some chemicals rank significantly higher than others on a toxicity scale, the most toxic chemicals will be subject to the most intense monitoring and pollution-prevention measures.
Meanwhile, the chemical industry uses CRS systems to set priorities for research and development and pollution prevention. If a chemical tops the list in terms of its toxicity to aquatic life, for instance, its manufacturer might step up its efforts to develop a similar, but less-harmful, substitute.
"With broad application and consistent methods, CRS has great potential for helping scientists and regulators assess and control chemical releases into the environment," Davis says. "In fact, it's already becoming an important tool for cleanup activities."
Given the wide variety of uses and the array of chemicals to consider, no single CRS system is appropriate for all applications. However, a framework could be structured that would allow for some uniformity among various CRS systems. Development of such a framework represented the workshop's primary goal.
Five working groups, two of which Davis and Swanson led, examined these and other issues, including effects on humans and ecosystems and the increased risks of fire or corrosion that are frequently associated with chemical use.
"The workshop succeeded in meeting its goals," says Davis. "And we're eager to delve further into some of the issues we identified."
Other participants agreed that additional workshops will be necessary to refine a versatile approach.
However, each step CRS practitioners make toward a unified system increases confidence that chemical ranking-and-scoring systems will provide uniform and meaningful guidance to regulators, chemical manufacturers, academics, and environmentalists.
For more information, contact Gary Davis or Mary Swanson, University of Tennessee, Center for Clean Products and Clean Technologies, 311 Conference Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, or call 865-974-8979
Thailand boasts one of the fastest growing economies in East Asia. As a result, it faces the serious environmental problems that accompany rapid development, including air, soil, and water pollution.
But thanks to Dararatt Anantanasuwong, a professor at the National Institute of Developmental Economics in Bangkok, Thai graduate students are learning new ways to confront these environmental obstacles.
Among the lessons Anantanasuwong imparts to her students are those she first learned in the mid-1980s while working as a graduate research assistant at the University of Tennessee's Waste Management Research and Education Institute (WMREI).
Anantanasuwong, who earned her doctorate in developmental economics from UT, has returned to WMREI once again, this time to complete post-graduate research that will help keep her abreast of changes taking place in the field of environmental economics. In particular, Anantanasuwong is studying voluntary, market-based strategies for improving the environmental performance of Thai industries.
In 1986, while completing her doctorate, Anantanasuwong served as a graduate student under Robert Bohm, UT economics professor and associate director of UT's Energy, Environment, and Resources Center (EERC), an affiliate organization of WMREI. Jean Peretz, WMREI senior research associate, assisted in the project. In her work with Bohm and Peretz, Anantanasuwong helped create a database that tracked Tennessee producers of hazardous waste.
"We catalogued the generators of hazardous waste in Tennessee by industry and calculated the amounts and types of waste they were producing," Anantanasuwong says. "We also assessed each producer's method of treatment and disposal."
By obtaining that information, Bohm, Peretz, and Anantanasuwong were able to project the amount of hazardous waste that would be generated in Tennessee to 2000. From there, they investigated whether the state would have the capacity to treat it.
The skills Anantanasuwong learned while working on the WMREI project enabled her to make an important contribution to her own country's environmental programs. Returning to Thailand in 1988, she produced feasibility studies for waste-water and solid-waste treatment projects for both federal and municipal governments.
She also brought her expertise back into the classroom, teaching developmental and environmental economics to graduate students at Bangkok's National Institute of Development and King Mongkut Institute of Technology.
"It's rewarding to know that former students like Dararatt are putting what they've learned at UT to work across the globe," says Bohm, who points out that EERC is one of the nation's oldest university-based environmental research institutes.
And, as Peretz adds, students like Anantanasuwong make a valuable contribution to the institute.
"It's good for us to hear an unbiased view of American environmental regulations and their potential for solving problems in other countries," says Peretz. "We often learn from foreign students that what works in the United States may not be appropriate in other countries."
The Asia Foundation, a joint United States-Asian organization devoted to environmental improvement, recently offered Anantanasuwong the opportunity to return to WMREI on an environmental fellowship. Bohm, her former mentor, agreed to sponsor her while she studies market-based strategies for waste management.
"To address Thailand's pressing pollution problems, I hoped that some of the same market-based strategies that the United States is pursuing could be adopted in Thailand," Anantanasuwong says.
She has concluded that emissions trading and similar strategies that rely on competition between industries would be of little benefit in Thailand because its electric utility, Electricity Generation Authority of Thailand, is a monopoly.
She maintains, however, that other economic incentives will likely succeed in Thailand. Among them are those that involve charging industries user fees at waste-water-treatment plants or landfills and incentives aimed at reducing production costs through waste minimization.
For example, an industry might choose to use recyclable plastics rather than pay for their disposal. Or it might form non-recyclable wastes into new products, rather than send them to the landfill.
"Thailand has traditionally pursued end-of-the-pipe strategies for waste management," says Anantanasuwong. As a result, she says, there has been little incentive for industries to minimize the amount of waste they generate. Landfill space is still plentiful and landfill costs are low. In addition, wastewater treatment facilities have been subsidized by the central government, so their fees are artificially low.
This situation is changing, however. As a result of new, stricter environmental legislation, municipal governments will soon have to bear all the costs associated with waste treatment and disposal. When these costs are returned to the consumer, there will be greater incentives for businesses to reduce waste.
"At WMREI I've learned that pollution-prevention incentives can be effective at preventing environmental damage from occurring in the first place," she says. "I'm grateful to WMREI for the opportunity to catch up on the progress hazardous waste managers have made in the United States."
For more information contact Robert Bohm, University of Tennessee, WMREI, 311 Conference Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, or call 865-974-4251.