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.

Science Meets Sludge

Engineered organisms can identify troublesome toxicants entering wastewater treatment plants and boost the efficiency of activated sludge.

By Elise LeQuire

While the Human Genome Project seeks to unlock the secrets encoded in human genes, investigators at the University of Tennessee (UT) are tracking the pedigrees of lowly bacteria and genetically altering their DNA.

Researchers at UT’s Center for Environmental Biotechnology (CEB) are using two different techniques in separate projects to identify and monitor bacteria in activated sludge. Activated sludge is the microbial community that metabolizes a variety of carbon compounds into CO2 and lowers the organic load of the effluent.

CEB is an affiliate of UT’s Waste Management Research and Education Institute (WMREI). The center works closely with researchers at UT and with private industry to move basic research into applied technologies.

These two research projects will adapt the ground-breaking research to the hands-on monitoring of wastewater treatment plants. They will also allow finetuning of wastewater plant response to sudden changes in water composition.

Glowing Reports

A field demonstration at Knoxville Utility Board’s Kuwahee treatment facility may ultimately deploy bacteria that have been genetically engineered to emit light when they encounter certain toxic shocks. This bioluminescent reporter technology will first be tested on toxicants in a controlled, laboratory setting. Next, it will be tested on contaminants selected from the treatment facility. In the third stage of the project, the reporter will be used in actual plant operations to single out specific toxicants.

CEB Director Gary Sayler explains that this technique will allow a relatively unskilled worker to monitor operations at a waste-treatment plant. The simplest, and cheapest, monitoring method involves collecting water samples in a test tube and then adding the reporter bacteria, which glow in the presence of specific contaminants. A more elaborate technique places an organism at a particular point in the water flow, where it continuously monitors the waste stream and immediately signals changes in composition.

Unlike the marine bacterium that represents today’s standard in wastewater monitoring, these genetically altered bacteria were cultivated from activated sludge and are not overly sensitive to typical wastewater components. That sensitivity, which often kills the marine bacteria before they can do their job, was a major drawback in previous efforts that used freeze-dried, naturally occurring, bioluminescent marine bacteria, Sayler notes. These new, more resilient, bacteria can also be tailored to report on a variety of substances that affect water quality, including organic chemicals, acids and bases, and salts.

"The traditional organisms in a wastewater treatment facility are plow horses. By comparison, this organism is a thoroughbred," says Paul Frymier, assistant professor of chemical engineering at UT and a principal investigator for the project along with Sayler and Terry Schulz, a toxicologist with UT’s College of Veterinary Medicine. The bioluminescent reporter and associated analytical system are marketed by the Azur Environmental company under the trade name Microtox.

The technology will be useful in diagnosing toxic shocks and sporadic overloads in the water-treatment facilities. "When we engineer bacteria, we can make them specific to known toxic shocks," Sayler says. "In addition, we can move these genetic elements into treatment organisms that are more robust."

CEB, founded in 1986, is one of the oldest environmental biotechnology research centers in the country, and it is an international leader in moving basic research into practical applications.

"There are only a handful of people in the world working on this technology," says Kevin Robinson, a project team member and professor in UT’s department of civil and environmental engineering.

Bacterial Pedigree

A second project conducted jointly by Sayler, post-doctoral researcher Curtis Lajoie, and Robinson will assess the

activity of bacteria in activated sludge, which is used to treat both industrial and municipal wastewater (see "Sludge Busters," in the Fall 1997 issue of InSites). This project, funded in part by the Water Environment Research Foundation (WERF), will bring these new technologies to water-treatment facilities.

Different families of bacteria possess different qualities that affect their ability to treat wastewater. Typing of bacteria has historically been rudimentary and has not allowed accurate classification. Now, researchers use a specific subunit of the ribosome RNA that allows more accurate typing. "We can isolate the ribosomal RNA from the activated sludge. This RNA serves as fingerprints for the organisms," says Alice Layton, a post-doctoral researcher at CEB. "That is, we can find out who’s been in the system."

Both municipal and industrial treatment plants stand to gain from this project. The experimental groundwork is being laid not only at the Knoxville Kuwahee plant but also at the wastewater treatment system of the Tennessee Eastman Division of the Eastman Chemical Company in Kingsport, Tennessee.

The technology may also lead to better design of consumer products destined for disposal in municipal wastewater treatment plants, Robinson says. •

Contact Gary Salyer, CEB, The University of Tennessee, 676 Dabney Hall, Knoxville, TN 37996-1605, or call 865-974-8080.

Converging Paths

Researchers and advocacy groups identify clean production practices as a preferred route to sustainability.

By Laurie Varma

Most people believe there has to be a better way to manage the environment, but they may envision different ways of getting there. This past May nearly 50 clean-production researchers, environmental activists, union representatives, and environmental-justice advocates met at the University of Tennessee (UT) in Knoxville to discuss ways of achieving sustainable manufacturing in the United States.

The group explored seemingly divergent ideas like designing waste-free products, reducing our nation’s industrial ecological footprint, ensuring workers’ rights, and ending unjust placement of factories in neighborhoods of color. But everyone agreed that we could achieve more if we focused our efforts on the interconnections among the environment, the economy, and society.

The University/Public Interest Workshop on Clean Production and Clean Products was organized by UT’s Center for Clean Products and Clean Technologies (CCPCT) and the Center for Sustainable Production at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Workshop organizers sought to familiarize representatives of public interest groups with the concepts of clean production and clean products. CCPCT is an affiliate of UT’s Waste Management Research and Education Institute.

Says CCPCT’s Director Gary Davis, "We hoped to give participants a general understanding that environmental advocacy can be viewed more comprehensively by looking at product life cycles and the production chain instead of focusing on isolated facilities or environmental problems in a single location."

Davis told participants that, when we examine where and how products are made, what materials and production processes are used, and where products end up after they are used, concerns common to environmental, social-justice, and worker’s-rights advocates begin to emerge.

Working together, these three groups could have a much greater impact on product design and the selection of production materials than if they individually maintained a single focus on their local production facility or on products at a single life-cycle stage.

Front-End Focus

Workshop presenters highlighted the need for U.S. industries to shift from end-of-pipe solutions like waste treatment to design solutions and closed-system processes that reduce environmental impacts.

Clean products and clean production—notions that draw on industrial ecology and eco-efficiency—call for a shift from managing waste to conserving raw materials and energy, eliminating toxic substances from manufacturing, reducing the quantity and toxicity of emissions and waste, and reducing environmental impacts along a product’s entire life cycle.

Davis referenced the life cycle of a bar of soap to illustrate how products we use every day harm the environment because of how they are designed and produced. Producing and packaging bar soap includes resource extraction—trees are cut down for packaging, and salt is mined for producing the soap—and creates waste that often is released back into the environment.

"We want to encourage people and industries to think, ‘Do we need packaging? Do we need color, perfumes, and deodorants? Are there alternative raw materials that are less harmful?’" says Davis. "The cost of business-as-usual is too high, and tools like life-cycle assessment can help us focus on reducing impacts from the front end."

Life-cycle assessment (LCA), one of the workshop’s major themes, involves looking at a product’s life cycle—spanning raw materials acquisition, manufacture, use, and recycling or discard—and includes three phases. Inventory analysis catalogs energy use, emissions, and effluents resulting from a product’s manufacture, use, and disposal. Impact assessment qualitatively and quantitatively describes environmental impacts associated with the product, and improvement assessment evaluates opportunities for reducing the product’s environmental impacts. In simple terms, LCA helps identify product-design alternatives and material substitutes that will reduce environmental degradation.

In undertaking life-cycle management, which relies on LCA and other tools, stakeholders at all stages of a product’s life cycle work cooperatively to redesign it to be less harmful to the environment. For example, automobile manufacturers have worked with recyclers to restrict use of certain raw materials and to make car parts more conducive to recycling.

"Dirty" Dallying

Because 80 percent of opportunities to reduce waste lie in product design, says Davis, manufacturers who wait until they’re in production to think about preventing pollution are too late.

"You can find ways to minimize pollution by recycling waste within a plant, but it’s much more efficient if you choose to manufacture your products in ways that eliminate pollution in the first place," he says.

The problem of "dirty" production is exacerbated by product ideas that arise from consumer research, not technology, which means that companies focus on what will sell. Few product designers have a background in environmental issues, so products often are created in nonsustainable ways.

Corporate Capability

Presenters at the workshop discussed several policies aimed at increasing industry’s responsibility for products across products’ life cycles. For example, companies can use materials accounting to physically track natural resources and synthetic materials as they flow through a plant. They can also measure the flow of toxic substances through the plant, the amount of toxics generated as byproduct, and the amount of toxic materials incorporated into finished products.

Workshop presenter Ken Geiser of the University of Massachusetts’ Toxic Use Reduction Institute says companies often assume that materials accounting is too costly. The fact is, he says, many that have tried the procedure have found it profitable because it can lead to reduced waste and greater efficiency.

"The procedure provides valuable decision-making information to corporations and yields tremendous benefits to people and the environment," he says.

Companies that undertake initiatives to reduce the amount of materials and toxic substances used in product manufacturing are likely to use lighter and stronger materials; create products that are smaller and longer-lasting; reduce toxic, persistent, and bioaccumulative waste; and use biodegradable and renewable materials.

According to Geiser, clean-production practices can also provide companies with a competitive edge. For example, environmental protection can be profitable in terms of more efficient and less wasteful production processes. Clean-production practices can also allow a company to tout itself as an environmental steward.

"Companies in the United States are incorporating extended producer responsibility (EPR) without regulation because it increases customer satisfaction, produces cost savings, and encourages product innovation," Davis says.

EPR, a concept championed by CCPCT, calls for responsibility by a product’s manufacturer for the product’s life-cycle environmental impacts. Implementation of EPR can lead to product take-back programs, selection of substitute materials, service leasing in place of product purchase, and design of rechargeable and recyclable parts.

Clean-production policies also promote additional environmental policies. National governments and independent organizations around the world provide third-party evaluations of products and the extent to which they protect or exploit the environment.

"Product labeling promotes sustainability by helping people buy products that are better for the environment," says workshop participant Arthur Weissman of Green Seal, Inc. Green Seal is the United States’ leading eco-labeling organization. CCPCT provides technical resources for Green Seal’s programs.

Other policies include green scissors initiatives, which call for removing government subsidies from activities that degrade the environment, and green taxes, which involve taxing activities that have a negative effect on the environment and people instead of taxing beneficial activities, such as labor.

Feeding Frenzy

One of the main threats to sustainable development at the end of the 20th century is the massive level of consumption found throughout the world, but particularly in the United States.

"The consumption issue has been emerging over the past three or four years," Geiser told workshop participants. "It brings up related concerns about resource exhaustion, equity, and waste storage and clearly ties in to all our diverse concerns."

Sustainable-development researchers use the concept of the ecological footprint to illustrate the load imposed on nature by a given population. It quantifies the land area needed to sustain a group’s current resource consumption and waste discharge.

Beverley Thorpe of Clean Production Action, an environmental organization based in London, says that current activities and lifestyles in North America alone would require two additional planets to be truly sustainable. "The United States is the model for growing countries. What are we promoting? Our resources are being depleted, and our environmental problems are on the rise. We need to examine our lifestyles," she says.

Pressure Points

Joel Tickner of the University of Massachusetts-Lowell described how public-interest groups could advance clean-production concepts such as materials substitution, product labeling, and chemical phaseout to shift corporate responsibility from a focus on reducing emissions to an emphasis on changing production processes and product design. He also suggested that the clean production framework could be used to address consumption, expand public access to governmental and corporate decision making, and prompt consumers to exert market pressure on companies reluctant to adopt sustainable production practices.

"We’re talking about major transitions in many different arenas," says Jack Weinberg of Greenpeace. "Clean production is part of the answer to the question, ‘To what do we want to transition?’"

Davis says bringing so many diverse opinions together in one place was beneficial for everyone. "A sustainable future will require addressing all three legs of sustainability—the environmental, the social, and the economic—so the call to incorporate labor and community concerns into clean-production models is essential if we expect the movement toward clean production and products to succeed," he says.•

Contact Gary Davis, CCPCT, The University of Tennessee, 311 Conference Center Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, or call 865-974-1835.

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Tools That Help Industry Come Clean

U.S. legislation has targeted polluting industries for more than 20 years, but in 1996 U.S. companies still released more than 2 billion pounds of toxic chemicals into the environment. Our command-and-control, end-of-pipe focus has improved the environment but has not stopped industries from substituting one harmful chemical for another and shuffling pollutants among air, water, and land emissions.

Clean production tools such as chemical ranking and scoring (CRS) and cleaner technologies substitutes assessments (CTSAs) can help industries enhance environmental stewardship and lower operating costs by providing information about the environmental and human-health impacts of alternative manufacturing methods and materials.

Researchers with the University of Tennessee’s Center for Clean Products and Clean Technologies (CCPCT) are heading projects to help the automotive, electronics, and printing industries find alternatives that will conserve energy and resources, eliminate toxic substances, and reduce emissions and waste.

CRS provides information to management about the human-health and environmental hazards involved with using various chemicals. The CRS process typically results in a relative ranking of chemicals or assignment of chemicals to categories reflecting low, medium, and high concern. CHEMS (Chemical Hazard Evaluation for Management Strategies), a CRS tool developed at CCPCT, combines measures of toxicity to human health and the environment with data on chemical release, environmental persistence, and bioaccumulation to rank the relative hazards of chemicals if released to the environment.

Says Mary Swanson, one of CCPCT’s main CRS researchers, "A company could use CRS information to set priorities for pollution prevention efforts or to put chemical release data into a potential impact’ perspective."

CTSAs examine the comparative environmental and human-health risks, performance and cost-competitiveness, energy impacts, and resource conservation potential of traditional and alternative manufacturing methods and technologies. Steps typically include flow charting the steps in a manufacturing process; describing the chemicals, materials, and technologies involved in a process as well as those of commonly accepted alternatives; and reporting on the comparative performance, cost, health risk, and environmental impacts of existing and alternative operations.

Much of CCPCT’s substitutes assessment efforts are funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Design for the Environment (DfE) program. Lori Kincaid, a CCPCT researcher who conducts CTSAs with industry and community partners involved in the DfE program, says that product assessment should extend beyond risk reduction and also evaluate use of recycled materials, nontoxic materials, and materials with low-energy content.

Product assessment should also be used to extend product life, reduce the amount of materials used in production, and increase a product’s recyclability. Design for Remanufacture and Design for Efficient Longevity are concepts closely related to DfE.

"Businesses are finding that they can cut costs and improve competitiveness if they consider environmental issues up front as they design products and processes," Kincaid says. "DfE projects try to bring all stakeholders to the table so that both community and business concerns can be addressed during the CTSA process."

Both CRS and CTSA promote informed, environmentally conscious business decisions by incorporating environmental considerations into traditional business concerns regarding cost and performance. Using these tools, industries and organizations can choose alternative manufacturing technologies, processes, and materials so their products and services prevent pollution and degradation to human health and the environment from the front end.

—Laurie Varma

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Sustainable futures 101

A WMREI affiliate shapes lessons on sustainable living and hopes to implement them where they’ll do the most good.

By Laurie Varma

Few would argue against the inclusion of the three "Rs" in our educational system, but some forward-thinking educators insist that we should also add the letter "S"—for sustainability—to our curricula.

Rosalyn McKeown-Ice, director of the University of Tennessee’s (UT) Center for Geography and Environmental Education, is one of those forward thinkers. She recently began work on an effort aimed at guiding communities and education systems through a process of priority-setting and curriculum reorientation.

The goal is to help children grow up learning the three legs of sustainable development—maintenance of a healthy environment, social equality and justice, and sound economic development. But McKeown-Ice’s vision doesn’t end at the schoolhouse gate.

Though many people equate education with the process of learning that takes place in our public school system, McKeown-Ice points out that many of our most valuable educational lessons occur long after we’ve received our high school diplomas. Indeed, the average life span in the United States is 79 years, and schools have us for only about 13 of them. So who will educate us about living sustainably once we graduate from high school?

McKeown-Ice believes the answer lies, in part, in tapping into the instructive power of the informal education sectors, which include nature centers, public health offices, and the mass media.

Life-long Learning

Efforts to incorporate the principles of sustainable development throughout curricula and the continuing-education sector support the theme of education for sustainable development (ESD). McKeown-Ice’s project grew from the attention ESD received at the United Nations (UN) Conference on Environment and Development, also known as the "Earth Summit," held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 and later at the UN Commission on Sustainable Development meeting in April 1998. Her work is part of the larger, worldwide ESD effort headed by UNESCO (UN Education, Science, and Cultural Organization).

McKeown-Ice will develop a series of checklists and exercises to help communities around the world set priorities and assess their strengths and weaknesses with regard to sustainable attitudes and practices. Her work will include examination of curriculum-change processes and tools developed by the Toronto Board of Education and other organizations that have shown leadership in support of ESD programs (see "Educating for Tomorow," next page, for details on Toronto’s efforts and McKeown-Ice’s documentation of them).

McKeown-Ice’s toolkit will be pilot-tested and posted on the World Wide Web for free access by communities around the world.

Ideally, McKeown-Ice says, ESD curricula should address issues involving both the natural and human-built environment on local and global scales. Because the issues facing each community differ, ESD curricula will vary widely from region to region and from country to country.

One Size Won’t Fit

"A one-size-fits-all curriculum is not going to work because no community is exactly like another," McKeown-Ice says. "One of the hallmarks of sustainable development is that programs must be locally relevant and culturally appropriate. ESD allows curricula to be tailored to specific needs while it addresses all three legs of sustainable development."

To develop curricula, communities must assess their unique features, priorities, and needs. In short, says McKeown-Ice, they’ll have to decide what their children should know when they leave the formal education system.

"For example," she says, "if you’re in a coastal fishing community, an ESD curriculum focused on the ocean, marine life, and fisheries may be what children need if they are to adopt sustainable lifestyles. However, if you’re in a land-locked state like Tennessee, you probably don’t need to teach those concepts as much as you might need to teach children about forests, rivers, consumerism, and power generation."

McKeown-Ice stresses the importance of getting all education sectors in a community to collaborate. "Ideally, the informal and formal education sectors would meet to discuss creating a holistic plan for educating people from ‘cradle to grave’ to make sustainable choices and to view the world from a sustainability perspective," she says. "The community would decide what it wants its members to know, do, and value, and the education sectors together would be responsible for ensuring that learning takes place around all three legs of sustainable development."

Media Role

For example, McKeown-Ice says, the media can play a significant role in educating the public about the concept of sustainable development. "The media also can spur people to act in environmentally responsible ways and can create a well-informed voting citizenry," she says. Nature centers and public health offices can provide locally relevant information such as how to respond to invasive plant species and how to prevent childhood lead poisoning.

Cradle-to-grave education is vital to a sustainable future because everyone needs to know how to live sustainably, and all must understand the repercussions of making nonsustainable choices, whether those choices are made on an individual, regional, national, or global level.

Parents, for example, need to think about the effects of passing along wasteful, consumptive habits and nonsustainable expectations for material wealth to their children, and health-care professionals should understand the effects of industrial and residential chemicals on human and animal health. Awareness of alternatives is a must.

Teaching Teachers

McKeown-Ice points out that any changes in school curricula need to be combined with new teacher-education curricula. "There are 59 million teachers worldwide," she says. "We need to work with the institutions that train teachers so their own education prepares them to teach new generations about living sustainably."

We’ve come to an era, says McKeown-Ice, when people all over the world—school children, community members, and the formal and informal education sectors—must work together toward a sustainable future. Communities must construct ESD programs based on their unique needs, but all must reflect the emerging consensus that we need to do things differently. •

Contact Rosalyn McKeown-Ice, CGEE, The University of Tennessee, 311 Conference Center Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, or call 865-974-1880.

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Educating for Tomorrow

The Toronto Board of Education serves as role model for school systems intent on teaching the principles of sustainable living.

Education reform to bring the principles of sustainable development into the classroom is a relatively new concept, but a few forward-thinking organizations seem up to the task. Rosalyn McKeown-Ice, director of the University of Tennessee’s (UT) Center for Geography and Environmental Education (CGEE), is working with one such organization, the Toronto Board of Education (TBE), to document its approach to overhauling citywide curriculum requirements.

To begin its education reform, TBE undertook a massive community consultation. Its members asked thousands of parents, students, teachers, and area residents, "What should students know, do, and value by the time they graduate?" The board made special efforts to poll members of minority and immigrant groups.

"The TBE got a wonderful outpouring of responses from the community, and from the responses, board members identified six graduation outcomes," says McKeown-Ice. Graduation outcomes now include literacy; creativity and aesthetic appreciation; communication and collaboration; information management; responsible citizenship; and personal life skills, values, and actions. From these desired outcomes, TBE rewrote curriculum requirements and changed report cards to reflect these goals.

One of the most important aspects of TBE’s curriculum reorientation was a shift from an emphasis on teachers’ actions to educational outcomes. "Under the traditional educational system, teachers focus on actions—they teach math or science or English," McKeown-Ice says. "Now, Toronto teachers focus on outcomes—after a course, kids will be able to list the parts of the local ecosystem or explain the reasons behind things they observe in the world around them."

Although TBE’s efforts were not directly aimed at teaching children about living sustainably, knowledge and skill areas emerged that are dynamically linked to the concept of sustainable development.

Toronto’s new curriculum has reformed traditional core subjects to include new materials that stakeholders deemed vital to understanding the future. For example, in mathematics, students now learn about extremely small units, such as ppb (parts per billion) or ppm (parts per million)—units commonly used to measure the presence of toxic substances in water and air. Familiarity with these units of measure is essential to environmental literacy. And health classes now must address sustainability issues, such as cancer, allergies, food additives, and consumerism.

McKeown-Ice recently began recording TBE’s process so that other communities can benefit from Toronto’s knowledge and experience. "To do that, I’m in the process of interviewing people who were involved in the curriculum reorientation effort, including co-chairs, research staff, and the community-consultation facilitator," she says.

McKeown-Ice’s work will be published as a monograph by UT’s Waste Management Research and Education Institute and posted on a Web site hosted by UNESCO (United Nations Education, Science, and Cultural Organization). TBE’s efforts will also be highlighted in a case study to be featured in the toolkit McKeown-Ice is developing for schools and communities that want to create curricula focused on education for sustainable development (see "Sustainable Futures 101," page 4).

—Laurie Varma

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Driving for a Bargain

Mass-merchandise chains may offer U.S. consumers convenience and cost savings, but are they also discounting air quality?

By Laurie Varma

Everyone knows that today’s chains and superstores have sprung up like row crops along urban and suburban thoroughfares and that they’ve beaten down "mom and pop" operations. But few consumers have considered possible links between these "big-box" retailers and the car emissions that increasingly threaten human and environmental health.

University of Tennessee (UT) researchers Ed Hillsman, Don Alvic, and Tom Bell are exploring whether this current retailing trend is increasing the distance consumers travel and, therefore, whether the growth of big-box operations is contributing to declining air quality and other environmental problems.

Hillsman and Alvic work with UT’s Systems Development Institute (SDI), a cooperative effort between UT’s Energy, Environment, and Resources Center and UT’s Transportation Center. Bell is a professor in UT’s geography department. Peggy Gripshover, a UT alumna and geography professor at West Virginia’s Marshall University, is collaborating with the UT researchers. The project is funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Prices Drop, Temperatures Climb

The connection between auto emissions and atmospheric impacts has been of concern to scientists for the past few decades. The Earth sustains a natural greenhouse effect that protects us from intolerable cold. Some greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and nitrous oxide, are present in car exhaust. These gases trap infrared radiation emitted from the Earth’s surface, which gets projected back toward the planet.

Human activities, including the burning of fossil fuel for transportation, have upset the balance of naturally occurring greenhouse gases and have led to higher global temperatures and ozone layer depletion.

Says Hillsman, "The EPA monitors the effects of transportation on the environment, and it’s becoming increasingly concerned with big-box retailers because they are the latest manifestation of suburban sprawl, which has been linked to increased driving and air-quality issues."

In the 1950s, retailing in the United States was dominated by "mom and pop" stores, often located in proximity to their clientele. Although there were precursors of today’s modern shopping centers as early as 1916, it wasn’t until the mid-1950s that enclosed, climate-controlled shopping malls caught on.

Today retailing is becoming dominated by big boxes—"hypermarket" stores such as Wal-Mart that sell a large variety and quantity of goods under one roof, and "category killers" such as Best Buy or Toys R Us, which feature a large, comprehensive stock and tend to dominate the market for particular product categories.

Cost of Convenience

Big boxes have clear advantages for thrifty shoppers, chiefly low prices and the convenience of being able to purchase many items with one stop.

"Big-box retailing began as early as the 1950s and then gained ground in the 1980s," says Bell. "Today, these big, concrete stores go up overnight in nearly every U.S. town and region."

While many of us accept the emergence of big boxes as part of modern progress, Hillsman and Bell take another tack. "In the 1950s, shoppers had far fewer options than they do today," Bell says. "We want to look at the growth of shopping options and discover whether it’s meant increased driving, diminished air quality, and environmental degradation."

Hillsman, Alvic, Bell, and Gripshover’s project focuses on the influence of big boxes on shopping and driving behavior in the Southeast. In particular, they have begun surveying shoppers at big-box and other retailers in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Huntington, West Virginia.

By studying shopping and driving in these two towns, the researchers hope to compare shopping-related behaviors and attitudes in small and medium-sized cities. Knoxville is about three times larger than Huntington.

"We’ve already found out some interesting differences," says Bell. "For example, people living in Huntington aren’t as concerned about traffic and the time it takes to get to a store as people in more populated areas like Knoxville might be. One question we’ll ask is whether attitudes like these influence how people shop and how they utilize big boxes."

Profile of a Shopper

The researchers are collecting information about respondents’ shopping style—how many stops shoppers had made or would be making during their shopping trip, other places shoppers had looked for their items and the amount of time they’d looked, other places shoppers knew that carried the goods, and reasons for shopping at the survey location. The survey also collected demographic data about the shoppers.

"We want to see whether there are different shopping and transportation patterns among different groups of people," says Hillsman. "For example, we’ll compare students versus nonstudents, people who are married and/or have families versus single people, and retirees versus people who are still working. We’ll also look for differences by age, sex, household income, number of drivers in the household, and mail-order behavior."

The researchers are also looking at "trip-chaining"—linking several stops together in one shopping trip. Bell says he and his colleagues want to find out whether shoppers are actually linking stops or making separate trips and whether or not trip-chaining actually reduces driving.

"When you look at this phenomenon superficially," Bell says, "it’s hard to tell whether combining stops at various stores into one shopping trip results in more or less driving."

Miles per Bargain

By collecting demographic data on shopping behaviors, Hillsman and Bell will be able to profile big-box-related shopping behavior and estimate vehicle miles traveled for each respondent.

Next, the researchers will create a simulation to compare the pre-big-box retail landscape with today’s. They’ll use a 1960s-era scenario marked by more compact shopping areas and housing to compare the vehicle miles people would have traveled then versus now.

Hillsman says researchers hope to understand the big-box phenomenon from a transportation perspective; determine whether shoppers undertake extra travel because of the presence of big boxes; and assess the potential environmental impacts of increased travel, which, the researchers have hypothesized, results from the emergence of big-box retailers in the 1990s.

When Hillsman talks about what he’d like to find in the results of his research, he says he wears two hats. "As a researcher," he says, "I’d like good, solid results that show something is happening—to be the one to reveal that big boxes are leading to increased driving and thus increased emissions."

However, as a citizen, Hillsman says he’d like to find out that big boxes are not affecting transportation and the environment, because it would be difficult to undo current retailing trends or to push through legislation aimed at restricting their development.

Southeastern Scope

Research findings will be most applicable to the southeastern United States or other regions where towns grew up suburb-style following World War II, with no strongly identifiable urban core. Hillsman points out that the Northeast and other major metropolitan areas such as Chicago are older and have developed differently. Building and zoning codes, land costs, and limited space for parking in such cities do not encourage big-box growth to the same extent as in the Southeast.

Likewise, the western and southwestern parts of the country, because of wide open spaces and vast drive times between major cities, are far more oriented toward car travel than Knoxville and Huntington.

"This project represents an attempt to describe the problem, if there is one, in cities like Knoxville, particularly throughout the Southeast," Hillsman says.

Hillsman stresses that understanding the impact of the big-box-retailing trend on our environment is important because we are arriving at an era when assessing traffic demand and increasing capacity will not be enough.

"The answer can no longer be ‘build more roads’—it’s too detrimental," he says. Instead we need to move past this type of thinking and find ways to help people reduce the amount they drive.

"For example, lawn-mower services have become more prevalent in the past five to seven years; this activity represents an entirely new type of transportation use and source of emissions. People who mow their own yards incur zero transportation." However, Hillsman points out, in both cases, operation of lawn mowers does involve emissions.

Hillsman says some of these smaller-scale, less-necessary transportation uses could be curbed "without disrupting our lifestyles. To borrow an analogy from the electric-power industry, ‘If you save a few kilowatts here and there, pretty soon you’ve saved enough energy to avoid building a new power plant.’

"If we could separate transportation-related behavior from motivations, we could free ourselves from the assumption that how we do things now is how things must or should be done," Hillsman says. "Then we’d be able to find ways of getting things done that are less harmful to the environment." •

Contact Ed Hillsman, EERC/SDI, The University of Tennessee, 10521 Research Drive, Knoxville, TN 37932, or call 865-974-8410.

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