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WMREI grant program supports UT research 

Each year, the University of TennesseeÕs Waste Management Research and Education Institute

sponsors pioneering research.

by <AU>Elise LeQuire</AU>

Eleven University of Tennessee (UT) research teams were recently awarded one-year research grants through the policy division of UT's Waste Management Research and Education Institute (WMREI).

The researchers received grants totaling $300,000 in categories that spanned the fields of municipal solid-waste management, environmental priority-setting, sustainable development, ozone monitoring, and total quality environmental management, according to Jack Barkenbus, WMREI policy director and executive director of UT's Energy, Environment, and Resources Center (EERC).

In the grant review process, WMREI gave special consideration to pioneering research and work that has significant potential effects on the nation's public policy, says Barkenbus.

For instance, David Feldman, a WMREI senior research scientist, will analyze how communities, stakeholder groups, and agencies devise solutions for environmental problems that go beyond political and geographic boundaries.

Common Ground

Feldman's research takes as a point of departure a previous two-year project on community approaches to environmental problem solving that was funded by WMREI. This year, Feldman and a graduate student assistant will assess successful strategies for negotiating place-based environmental protection.

The team will conduct telephone interviews of policymakers in four to six geographic areas, ranging from small, local watersheds that are the focus of wetland and stream restoration projects, to a large metropolitan region (for example, St. Louis, Missouri/E. St. Louis, Illinois) that is tackling the problem of urban sprawl.

"Our hypothesis is that, if you hope to make place-based initiatives work, you have to find a way to involve all concerned parties in defining and negotiating the issues," Feldman says.

Specifically, the researchers will look at the various stages of the negotiating process and identify successful strategies as well as obstacles.

Environmental Quality

A project spearheaded by Iain Clelland, assistant professor with UT's Tennessee Institute for Management and the Environment, will assess the costs and benefits, as well as diffusion, of total quality environmental management (TQEM) programs in the pulp and paper, chemical, petroleum, food, and electronics industries. TQEM is an environmental planning tool that seeks to balance economic development and growth with environmental sustainability. "In essence, our research question is this: What factors enable TQEM to serve as a self-sufficient process providing both competitive flexibility for firms and cumulative eco-efficiency with minimal external intervention?" says Clelland.

WMREI Research Scientist Jean Peretz received a grant to continue a study on toxicity reduction in Tennessee's printing and publishing industry. The first step, Peretz says, is to examine trends in hazardous-waste reduction across this sector.

Of greater importance, however, is whether these firms are focusing their efforts on reducing the more benign hazardous waste streams or the more toxic ones.

Waste Discrimination

"All hazardous wastes are not equal," Peretz notes. "We're looking at the various chemical constituents in hazardous waste, recognizing that some are more harmful than others. Then we calculate reductions based not only on volume, but also on the hazard value."

Though EPA does not require that generators report the various constituents of hazardous waste, beginning in the mid-1980s, Tennessee required waste generators to submit a report on these chemical constituents in their annual hazardous-waste summaries.

Peretz's teammates include Mary Swanson, research scientist with the EERC's Center for Clean Products and Clean Technologies (CCPCT), and Richard Jendrucko, a professor in the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering and engineering science. "Richard looks at the printing process to assess which aspects produce the most waste," Peretz says. "He is also looking at the various raw materials that are used in the manufacturing process." Swanson, who helped develop a chemical ranking and scoring system at CCPCT, is building on that method through the current research.

Such quantifiable data will help industry leaders assess their businesses' environmental performance. Because the team recognizes that different wastes pose different risks to health and the environment, their work will help policymakers evaluate waste-reduction activities in the state.

Growing Pains

Another WMREI-funded research effort will address the issue of sustainable economic development in Tennessee. In the past, economic development and environmental protection were seen as warring interests, but now "they're increasingly recognized as companions in a long walk into the future," says Mary English, EERC associate director, who, with Peretz, will co-direct a project on sustainable (or "smart") growth among Tennessee communities. Jack Barkenbus will head a faculty advisory committee for the project.

Many towns and counties in Tennessee are suffering growing pains, English says. While a few Tennessee communities, including Chattanooga, have committed to quality development) merging environmental, corporate, and governmental goals (more research needs to be done in terms of evaluating successful planning processes for growth. "This project will identify one or more processes that can be used by Tennessee towns and counties as models for planning smart growth," English says. Part of the research includes evaluating the feasibility of using computer-based models to forecast economic and environmental trends.

"This work should help the research team recommend an approach or a combination of approaches for smart-growth planning at the county and municipal level in Tennessee," English says.

Each year, WMREI issues a call for proposals in the spring and welcomes submissions from faculty and staff members of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

WMREI was launched in 1985 as a state-sponsored Center of Excellence. Primary funding for the grants comes from the Tennessee Higher Education Commission Centers of Excellence and the University of Tennessee.

For more information

Contact Jack Barkenbus, The University of Tennessee,

311 Conference Center Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, or call 865-974-4251.

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Sludge Busters 

A new technology allows scientists to decipher the mysterious "black box" of bacteria inhabiting waste-water-treatment plants.

by <AU>Kris Christen</AU>

A revolution is brewing in the com-

plex world of microbiology as scientists gain understanding of the basic properties of life itself and apply this newfound knowledge in addressing some pestering environmental problems. There's no small irony in the fact that some of this growing awareness may wind up, of all places, in the sludge pool.

Through the decoding or "sequencing" of bacterial RNA found in sludge, a byproduct of waste-water-treatment plants (WWTPs), scientists are discovering whole new groups of microorganisms they didn't know existed.

Microbial Who's Who

This new sequencing technology may help WWTPs operate more effectively, and University of Tennessee (UT) researchers hope to achieve this goal by creating a database (sort of a Who'sWho of microbes present in a typical waste-water-treatment plant) and posting it on the World Wide Web.

"Creation of such a database might allow us to control and greatly improve the effectiveness of waste-water-treatment plants," says Gary Sayler, director of UT's Waste Management Research and Education Institute (WMREI) and director of UT's Center for Environmental Biotechnology (CEB). CEB is a research wing of WMREI. "The results will lead to development of techniques that are both cost-effective and environmentally beneficial."

As it stands now, WWTPs don't always function effectively because sludge tends to bulk up in certain situations for reasons that are largely unknown. In these instances, expensive remedies must be implemented to keep the sludge from being discharged along with clarified water into streams that supply many cities with their drinking water. Researchers at CEB, WMREI, and UT's Pellissippi Research Institute (PRI) are teaming up in a multi-disciplinary effort to create a database that may one day provide the key to solving these decades-old waste-treatment problems.

The project's principal investigators are Curtis Lajoie and Alice Layton, CEB post-doctorate research associates, who will be collecting and analyzing the data; Steve Stamm, a PRI research associate, who will be developing the software; and WMREI Assistant Director Kim Davis, who will act as a facilitator between the two groups and solicit industrial support for the project.

The projectÕs goal is to correlate the different types of bacteria that various researchers have already sequenced with the operating conditions typical in most WWTPs.

RNA Roll Call

RNA sequencing offers scientists a detailed look into the blend of organisms populating common sludge, allowing them to rapidly assess this microbial community in ways that werenÕt previously possible.

Indeed, by extracting the 16S RNA gene found in the ribosomes of all living things, scientists are now able to identify the individual bacteria living in the sludge because each one has its own unique sequence or signature.

"When you looked through the microscope before, you saw very indistinct types of bacteria within the floc structure, and you weren't always sure exactly what they were," Davis says. "Now we have this new technology to look at the RNA sequence itself and know exactly what's there, which will help us determine why sludge behaves as it does."

Over time, the researchers hope to collect all the existing sequences of 16S RNA, along with the associated sludge quality and waste characteristics, into a database on the World Wide Web where scientists around the world can readily access this information and add their own data. "This represents an enormous opportunity to tie in those very basic waste-water-treatment conditions that you see all the time with certain types of bacteria," Davis says.

Says Lajoie: "At some point, we should be able to say for sure what the bacteria mean to the plant's operation and which plant conditions we need to change to make the plants more efficient."

Because of growing populations and shrinking budgets for WWTPs, there is a dire need for getting these plants to process higher loads with minimal problems and cut down the operational costs at the same time. "For a long time, industries and municipalities focused on meeting environmental standards," Lajoie says. "Now, more and more, they're asking, "how can we meet these standards at a lower cost and with higher efficiency? And if we're expanding industrial capacity, do we necessarily have to build a bigger plant?" Our database may help them answer those questions."

For more information

Contact Kim Davis, The University of Tennessee, EERC,

311 Conference Center Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134 or call 865-974-4251.

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Rivers and Valleys

Russian and American teachers discover that rivers speak a universal language and that regions separated by continents often share

environmental problems and opportunities.

by <AU>Elise LeQuire</AU>

Put 15 Russian and nine American school teachers in a whitewater raft floating down the Chattahootchee River in Georgia, and language barriers succumb to the more immediate concern of negotiating the next rapid.

The raft trip was one of many activities the 24 teachers of students in grades seven through 12 shared during River-to-River '97, a three-week program of workshops, lectures, and field trips held in Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee to promote awareness of environmental issues common to the two countries.

River-to-River '97 was funded by the U.S. Information Agency and directed by the University of Tennessee's Center for Geography and Environmental Education (CGEE), an affiliate of the Waste Management Research and Education Institute; Rostov State University; Rostov Pedagogical University; the John M. Judy Environmental Education Consortium; and CEC International Partners.

Land, Water, and Waste

In the six years since River-to-River was launched, the focus has expanded beyond ecological themes to include waste-management issues. "It's a nice blend. Our expanded focus explores the human-land-water interaction," says CGEE Director Rosalyn McKeown-Ice.

Conference participants attended sessions on water quality and aquatic life, solid waste, and the culture of the Tennessee Valley. They also shared the best of their teaching techniques with each other and learned about teaching the concept of taking personal responsibility for the environment.

Each year, the groups alternate between trips to the Tennessee Valley and to the Rostov district in southwest Russia. Rostov is a region much like the Tennessee Valley, with a mixed economy of agriculture and industry, a large watershed around the navigable Don River, and major university and research institutions that contribute to the region's growth.

A crucial goal of the exchange is to foster long-term, one-on-one partnerships between teachers from each country. For instance, for five years, Mariana Kesgen, an elementary science teacher at Fairview School in Sylva, North Carolina, has taught her students about water-quality and waste-management issues in cooperation with her Russian counterpart, Olga Zhilevich Khilevich.

Pen Pals Abroad

Last year, students in the sister schools took home scales donated by the CGEE, weighed their household garbage, kept meticulous charts, and analyzed and compared the data at the end of the year. The students also exchanged letters and photographs with their pen pals abroad. Since the exchange program started six years ago, two students from the United States have gone to Russia as "ecopartners" to visit their pen pals, Kesgen says.

Although River-to-River is designed to boost student environmental awareness, in some cases, the project has brought improvements to surrounding communities. Eugenia Marozova teaches ecology to students in grades seven through nine in the suburbs of Rostov-on-Don, an area of privately owned homes with no organized garbage pickup. She sent her students out of the classroom to conduct polls in their neighborhoods and assess the volume of trash being produced. The data they collected helped persuade the district administrators to arrange for garbage pickup.

Learn Now, Rest Later

The three-week exchange program boasted a dizzying schedule of lectures, field trips, pedagogical discussions, and cultural events, says McKeown-Ice, leaving participants little time to catch their breath. According to McKeown-Ice, that was all part of the plan.

"There are very few things that warrant sleep deprivation," she says, "but changing 24 teachers' world views is one of them."

For more information

Contact Rosalyn McKeown-Ice, CGEE, The University of Tennessee, 311 Conference Center Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, or call 865-974-4251.

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A little healthy give and take

An emerging principle promotes the notion

that manufacturers and consumers should share responsibility for the environmental impacts

of the products they produce and use.

by <AU>Elise LeQuire</AU>

Until recently, many businesses and industries have regarded environmentally responsible behavior as a costly process fraught with unwanted government intervention. But thanks to a relatively new idea, that perception is changing.

Extended Product Responsibility (EPR) encourages manufacturers to take into account all phases of a product's life cycle, from the extraction of natural resources, through the manufacturing process itself, to the product's end fate: recycling, reuse, or disposal.

An article on EPR, co-authored by Gary Davis, director of the University of Tennessee's (UT) Center for Clean Products and Clean Technologies (CCPCT); Catherine Wilt, senior research associate with UT's Waste Management Research and Education Institute (WMREI); and Jack Barkenbus, WMREI policy director, appears in the September 1997 issue of Environment magazine. Environment boasts a circulation of 12,000 and is regarded by environmental professionals, students, professors, and concerned citizens as one of the nation's leading environmental policy journals.

Shared Responsibility

EPR is a timely issue that is gaining force nationwide as well as internationally, and CCPCT is playing a leading role in shaping and tailoring the principle to fit the needs of U.S. businesses and consumers.

The article summarizes the results of three reports produced by Wilt and Davis since 1995. The first includes the proceedings of a 1994 EPR symposium (the first of its kind held in the United States) convened by CCPCT in Washington, D.C. The second, which was funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Office of Solid Waste, identifies and assesses programs created by U.S. companies that voluntarily pursued EPR initiatives. The third summarizes and analyzes regulations and policies that promote EPR in 12 developed countries.

EPR has emerged largely in response to problems associated with the command-and-control approach to environmental regulation, which imposes strict standards on industries and affords them little flexibility in devising ways to meet them. In that scenario, "government sets standards and issues regulations that outline exactly how businesses are expected to meet the standards," says Jack Barkenbus, who also serves as executive director of UT's Energy, Environment, and Resources Center.

Enter EPR, which allows industry more flexibility in achieving environmental goals through voluntary take-back programs, tax credits, "cleaner" product designs, and efforts to improve environmental performance up and down the manufacturing and supply chain.

Industry Responds

Industries that have bought into the concept (which include IBM, Xerox Corporation, Saturn Corporation, and Dow Chemical) often discover that they achieve environmental goals while reducing production and disposal costs and enhancing their operations' profitability.

EPR was originally conceived in the early 1990s by Thomas Lindhqvist, a Swedish researcher at Lund University. Lindhqvist was studying a 1993 German packaging ordinance that requires manufacturers to take back product packaging, and he generalized the trend toward extended environmental responsibility and arrived at the concept of "Extended Producer Responsibility," Davis says. In the United States, the term was modified to Extended Product Responsibility to convey the idea that the responsibility is shared by producers and consumers.

In fact, Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands have for some time mandated varying forms of EPR. However, both in the United States and abroad, there is a movement afoot to provide incentives for companies to initiate voluntary EPR programs designed to reduce waste throughout a product's life. "Some companies implement EPR voluntarily to recover valuable products for remanufacturing and recycling," says Davis. "Xerox, for instance, remanufactures copiers that have been leased so they can be leased again. In the process, the company saves millions of dollars in manufacturing costs and diverts products from the landfill."

Government can, however, help promote the concept of EPR by encouraging or requiring disclosure of environmental information, by purchasing supplies that have a lower impact on the environment, and through subsidies and tax credits, the authors say. In fact, U.S. companies are increasingly aware that voluntary compliance can forestall the implementation of costly command-and-control regulations and actually save them money.

Trim Waste, Boost Profits

"Any time you're discarding something, wherever there's a waste product, that waste has a cost," Wilt says. "When you can redesign a process or a product to remove that waste, you reduce the cost. That translates to benefits to the company."

The authors explain several approaches to implementing EPR in their article "Extended Product Responsibility: A New Principle for Sustainable Production and Consumption."

Voluntary take-back entails a company's commitment to recycling or reusing used equipment, parts, or packaging that it voluntarily accepts from consumers. Under a leasing arrangement, firms may accept responsibility for maintaining a product during the term of the lease as well as recycling the product at the end of its useful life. In another scenario, a company looks upstream, planning in advance to produce components that can be easily reused or recycled.

While large companies from IBM to Saturn Corporation have embraced the EPR principle, part of the challenge is to get the word out to more companies that might be less familiar with, and at times even leery of, the concept. In 1996, the President's Council on Sustainable Development and the EPA sponsored an EPR workshop attended by Wilt. "Participants get the word out on the benefits of EPR by publicizing case studies and demonstration projects to show businesses what others have done," Wilt says. "The goal is to achieve beneficial reductions in environmental impact as well as beneficial sales increases."

Promoting environmental responsibility as a voluntary initiative can remove the need for a mandatory program. "Most of corporate America would prefer that," Wilt adds.

For more information

Contact Gary Davis, CCPCT, The University of Tennessee,

311 Conference Center Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, or call 865-974-4251.

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U.S. Companies Come Clean

Here's how a few leading corporations are doing their part to promote voluntary Extended Product Responsibility (EPR) programs.

l DOW Chemical has initiated a product stewardship program that provides distributors and customers with information about the proper use and risks of its chemicals.

l Saturn Corporation takes damaged bumpers back from repair shops, cleans them up in a central processing facility, and turns them into reusable plastic pellets.

l Ford Motor Company has 400 dismantlers in the United States that help keep 1.5 million pounds of automotive plastic a year out of our landfills.

l New Jersey Bell accepts and recycles parts from old telephones and answering machines. By offering customers discounts on a new automated answering service, which makes much of the old equipment obsolete, the company has made the program pay for itself.

l Xerox Corporation, which has

an ambitious goal of creating waste-free factories by 1998, dismantles copier cartridges and cleans, sorts, and repairs them to meet the standards for new parts.

l IBM Corporation uses recycled plastics in its computer components, and it has redesigned several of them so they're easier to recycle.

Source: Gary A. Davis, Catherine Wilt, and Jack N. Barkenbus. "Extended Product Responsibility: A New Principle for Sustainable Production and Consumption." Environment, September 1997.

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WMREI Sponsors Student Research

Since 1988 the Waste Management Research and Education Institute (WMREI) of the University of Tennessee (UT) has offered graduate fellowships to outstanding doctoral candidates whose research focuses on waste-related themes. These fellowships have proven to be invaluable springboards to productive careers for many past recipients.

"The WMREI fellowship is really what got me my current position," says Deborah Vaughn Nestor, a fellow in 1989-91 who currently serves as an economist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

As a WMREI fellow, Nestor studied under Robert A. Bohm, WMREI researcher and UT economics professor. Her dissertation focused on estimating cost functions for newspaper recycling programs. At the EPA, Nestor evaluates the economic effects of environmental regulations on waste management.

Waste to Energy

Michael Kelsay, a research associate at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, is another former WMREI fellow whose experience at UT led directly to his current position. Kelsay's 1992-93 WMREI fellowship grew from a 1992 fellowship with Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Energy and Global Climate Change Division. His dissertation, also directed by Bohm, involved a study of waste-to-energy facilities, chiefly incinerators, in the United States. During his tenure with WMREI, Kelsay conducted a year-long evaluation of why so many solid-waste incinerators had been canceled as they made their way through the decision-making process.

At the University of Missouri, Kelsay continues his research on waste-to-energy facilities. The WMREI fellowship provided valuable insight in terms of how to conduct research," he says. "It directly applies to what I do now."

Toxicity Testing

A recent recipient of a WMREI fellowship, Anna Bearden, received her M.S. in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at UT in May 1996. Her dissertation is an extension of the work of her advisor, Terry W. Schultz, a professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine and coordinator of UT's graduate program in environmental toxicology.

The research explores the reaction of primitive one-celled organisms that occur naturally in freshwater systems to water-borne contaminants. This research has implications for evaluating the toxicity of various chemicals.

WMREI fellows receive a one-year, $12,000 stipend in addition to remission of tuition and a $1,000 allowance for supplies and travel. Renewal of the fellowships for an additional year is contingent on the student's progress in the academic program and availability of funds.

The application deadline for 1998-99 WMREI fellowships is March 1, 1998..

For further information: contact Gail Farris, WMREI, The University of Tennessee, 311 Conference Center Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, or call 865-974-4251.

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InSites Sports New Look

Since its launch five years ago, InSites has brought you the latest information on the people and projects of the Waste Management Research and Education Institute of the University of Tennessee. Though our editorial focus remains the same, you'll notice that we've assumed a new appearance. We hope you'll agree that the new look is a bit more polished and a whole lot more inviting. You may also notice that Rebecca Robinson, InSites' publications coordinator, has left the masthead. Becky will be attending to other duties, and we'll miss the considerable contribution she's made to the newsletter's success over the years. Meanwhile, we'd like to welcome Constance Griffith on board as our new copy editor.

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Staff Citings

l Instruction. Gary Sayler, acting director of the Waste Management Research and Education Institute (WMREI), will be developing and instructing a new course titled "micro phylogeny" next spring for the University of Tennessee (UT). The course, microbiology 670, will include a lecture series featuring presentations from eight nationally and internationally known experts in the field of microbiology. Sayler was recently appointed associate editor of Environmental Science and Technology, a journal published by the American Chemical Society.

l Citations. Knoxville's Second Creek Task Force, under the leadership of Tim Gangaware, associate director of UT's Water Resources Research Center, has been cited in a book titled Lessons Learned. The book was published by American Rivers, a conservation organization based in Washington, D.C.

l Presentations. In May, Assistant Research Professor Jonathan Rubin chaired a panel on "Needs for an Economic Assessment" as part of a national workshop funded by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The panel explored various methods for measuring the economic effects of ozone concentrations on ecological systems. This year, Rubin will be leading a study on episodic ozone control under the auspices of WMREI.

l Publications. Lori Kincaid, associate director of UT's Center for Clean Products and Clean Technologies (CCPCT), and WMREI Senior Research Associate Catherine Wilt published "There Auto be a Law" in the March 1997 edition of Resource Recycling. Kincaid and Wilt's article is based on a CCPCT study of vehicle recycling programs in 21 developing and industrialized countries.

l Papers. WMREI Associate Director Kim Davis presented "Cost Analysis of Risk-Based Corrective Action" at Battelle's Fourth Annual International Symposium on In-Situ and On-Site Bioremediation held in New Orleans in April. Davis' research centers on the impact of the new risk-based corrective-action regulations on the cost of managing contaminated underground petroleum storage tanks in Tennessee.

l Conferences. In August, UT hosted the fifth annual Beneficial Reuse conference, which drew more than 100 participants and included presentations by some of the nation's leading experts on the policies, procedures, and technologies associated with recycling radioactive scrap metal. The conference was sponsored by UT's Energy, Environment, and Resources Center (EERC); Beneficial Reuse Symposia, Inc.; and the Association of Radioactive Metal Recyclers (ARMR), a trade organization housed at the EERC. To acquire conference proceedings, which cost $30, contact Louis Allen, ARMR, The University of Tennessee, 311 Conference Center Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, or call 865-974-4251.