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.
Table of Contents
Raiders of the Last Drop By Elise
LeQuire Down
and Dirty By Janice S. Clifford Life-Cycle
Design: An Update By Janice S. Clifford Sustainability:
A Toolkit By Janice S. Clifford E Staff
Citings
Water-thirsty
consumers have threatened the state’s water supply and spurred action in
Tennessee's General Assembly.
By Elise LeQuire
As the predicted drought settles in over the middle and eastern portion of the United States, Tennessee legislators have passed a law to protect the state's river basins. The Inter-Basin Water Transfer Act will, for the first time, give the state the power to control diversions of surface and groundwater outside the basin of origin.
David Feldman, a senior research scientist at the University of Tennessee's (UT) Energy, Environment and Resources Center (EERC), helped craft the bill, which received bipartisan support in the state legislature and was passed unanimously by both houses. Water disputes to the south have led to a sometimes acrimonious dispute between Georgia and the neighboring states of Alabama and Florida and have given increasing urgency to passage of the bill.
In addition, in 1998, rumors began to circulate that Atlanta might want to purchase large amounts of water from the private water company serving Chattanooga, which would divert large amounts of water from the Tennessee River to satisfy the Georgia city's needs.
"There are already diversions from Tennessee to Georgia, but in the long term the Chattanooga/Atlanta metro region is becoming economically and socially integrated," Feldman says. If metro Atlanta could divert large quantities of water, says Feldman, the health of the Tennessee River would be threatened. To the north, Kentucky has likewise considered diverting water from the Tennessee portion of the Cumberland River to serve the needs of some of its residents.
The bill protects not only surface waters such as rivers, lakes, and springs, but the underground water supply as well. The city of Memphis, for example, relies entirely on withdrawals from the Memphis Sand Aquifer, which it shares with Mississippi and several other states. Water levels in this aquifer had dropped nearly 77 feet by 1985, leading to potentially serious interstate conflict.
Negotiating this bill prompted state legislators to recognize that surface and groundwater are interconnected, Feldman says. The bill gives Tennessee the power to regulate groundwater withdrawals for diversion that might affect Tennessee’s surface waters.
Six southern states that border Tennessee—Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia—already have enacted legislation to measure and control withdrawals of their water resources, giving Tennessee further reason to seek protection of its own waters.
The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) has authority over water-quality issues but prior to passage of the bill had no statutory authority to control water quantity. In 1999, TDEC's Environmental Policy Office asked EERC to explore the need for long-term planning for Tennessee’s water supply.
The report that resulted, "Water Supply Challenges Facing Tennessee," coauthored by Feldman and Julia O. Elmendorf, a lawyer and research assistant at EERC, assesses the current state of common law governing Tennessee's waters. It also analyzes case studies that explore potential diversion of water from the Tennessee River to Atlanta and the interstate problems associated with managing the Memphis Sand Aquifer. The report, which represents one basis for the bill, found that existing state and federal laws were inadequate to protect Tennessee's waters and avert interstate water wars.
Groundwork for the bill was laid at a series of regional symposia on water issues, including a major conference in August 1998 in Chattanooga. (See “Protecting the Southeast’s Liquid Assets,” in the Winter 1998 edition of InSites.) The symposium, “Southeast Water Resources: Management and Supply,” was coordinated by Feldman and cosponsored by EERC, Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the Appalachian Regional Commission, UT's Water Resources Research Center, and others. The symposium addressed the need to head off regional water conflicts and foster interstate cooperation.
The “Southeast Water Supply Roundtable” convened in November 1998 in Peachtree City, Georgia, drew more than 100 participants from industry; state, federal, and local governments; and citizen and environmental groups to address water quantity issues facing the region. The event was co-sponsored by numerous state, regional, and national organizations, including TDEC.
Though TDEC and the administration sponsored the legislation, there were still significant hurdles to gaining sufficient political support. Feldman worked closely with TDEC attorney Alan Leiserson and Dodd Galbreath, head of the state's Environmental Policy Office, to ensure the bill would withstand any potential legal challenges. In addition, the bill exempts current riparian uses such as agricultural irrigation. This helped guarantee the support of thepowerful Tennessee Farm Bureau Federation.
The regulatory cost of doing business—specifically, the cost associated with acquiring a permit—under the bill was also an issue. The final version of the bill exempts current diverters from permit fees and gives TDEC authority to charge new diverters for permitting costs and to levy fines up to $10,000 for violations.
This is not the first time EERC has been called upon to help ward off potential interstate conflict on environmental issues. Before the Solid Waste Management Act was enacted in 1991, the state Office of Planning, a precursor to TDEC, asked EERC to conduct an 18-month study of solid waste practices in Tennessee. The study played a significant role in shaping the Act.
"In that instance, as with the current initiative on water-quantity, the state had tried to establish policy but was deterred by disputes among various parties,” says Jack N. Barkenbus, EERC executive director. "There was no good database. We were able to back up and find out the facts. It's the elected officials who have to make the decisions; we developed a policy that let everyone sit down and tell his or her side of the story."
Likewise, the information Feldman and Elmendorf collected convinced legislators that the water bill was not only good policy, but was a necessary law. "Existing laws and regulations were not sufficient to prevent threats to the state's water supply caused by diversion," Feldman says.
In addition, the issue was not ideologically divisive, and timely and positive media coverage helped convince lawmakers that the bill was necessary. The Nashville Tennessean, for example, ran a strongly supportive editorial just before the legislature reconvened in May.
Key sponsors of the bill in the General Assembly were Republican Representative Bill H. McAfee, Republican Senator Ron Ramsey, and Democratic Senator Ward Crutchfield.
Waste Not, Want Not
While Tennessee has an apparent abundance of water, there are spot shortages during hot, dry periods, which are also the times people use more water for sprinkling lawns and irrigating crops. Power demand also peaks during this period. In addition, TVA relies on adequate water levels in the Tennessee River to cool its two nuclear power plants.
"In previous droughts, TVA had considered how low water levels could affect its nuclear plants," Feldman says. But the vast majority of Tennessee's instream use of water—122 billion gallons per day in 1995—is used for hydroelectric power generation and flows through the turbines straight back into the river it comes from, says Susan Hutson, a hydrologist with the USGS.
Although offstream uses require water to be routed from the waterways, all but approximately 1 percent lost through evaporation or permanent diversions returns to the reservoirs. Diversions that remove water from its basin of origin—transporting water from Chattanooga to Atlanta, for instance—are not returned and can threaten water quantity, particularly during dry periods.
"In 1999, Tennessee public water supply was 840 million gallons a day, an 8-percent increase from 1995," Hutson says. The Inter-Basin Water Transfer Act will help ensure that water will be there in the future. Part of the expansion in water use is linked to population growth.
"The other half of the story is that many rural areas are expanding their service areas," Hutson says. "Growth in rural counties from 1990 to 1995 was greater than in the large metropolitan areas because the counties are now establishing their infrastructure."
In fact, growth in rural public water supply was around 30 percent in 1999, greater than population growth, because of these improvements.
The Inter-Basin Water Transfer Act divides the state into 10 river basins and requires public bodies such as municipal water suppliers and any private company providing water to the public to register annual withdrawals. Permits are for five years and are renewable.
The river-basin approach to water management is a key element of the law. This ensures that most of the water withdrawn for public and municipal uses returns to the river basin of origin and is not permanently diverted into another region. Severe drawdowns caused by diversions could threaten not only public water uses but also the important industrial, agricultural, recreational, and navigational functions of major rivers.
Feldman says this permitting process was necessary to ensure the state's continued oversight of water quantity. The decision to issue a permit will depend in part on the effects of a diversion on existing users, drought conditions, the quantity of water available, and potential alternative sources of supply.
But the bill’s ultimate aim is to inspire cooperation and long-term planning among users in basins, which will strengthen the state's authority to protect its water supply. "The Inter-basin Transfer Act ensures that however the region grows, the state will have more power to manage the water," Feldman says.
In short, the Act gives the state the authority to determine when a transfer is appropriate and when it’s not appropriate, based on its impact on people downstream.
“The bottom line is that if you remove water from a river and send it to another river, somebody downstream might be negatively affected,” says TDEC’s Galbreath. “The University of Tennessee and its academic resources have played a crucial role in arming the state with the information options it needs to properly prepare for future challenges, and we expect to dip into that deep well again.”
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For more information contact David Feldman, EERC, The University of Tennessee, 311 Conference Center Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, or call 865-974-4086.
UT Researchers return to the site—and the soil—of the nation’s first government-approved field release of genetically engineered organisms.
By Janice S. Clifford
An article in the March issue of Environmental Science & Technology reports on the nation’s first government-approved field release of genetically engineered organisms (GEMs) to degrade waste.
The article, “Controlled Field Release of a Bioluminescent Genetically Engineered Microorganism for Bioremediation Process Monitoring and Control,” was written by researchers at the University of Tennessee’s Center for Environmental Biotechnology (CEB) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
In 1996, CEB, in collaboration with ORNL and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, released an organism known as Pseudomonas fluorescens HK44. (See “Release of Engineered Organism Marks Biotechnology Milestone,” InSites, Fall 1996).
The organism, which specifically targets naphthalene, one of several polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) present at DOE sites around the country, represents an existing organism that has been genetically altered to produce light as it degrades the contaminant.
The organisms were released into six steel-lined tanks measuring 8 feet in diameter and 10 feet deep. Known as soil lysimeters, the tanks were constructed on the Oak Ridge Reservation in 1987 to investigate acceptable disposal strategies for radioactive wastes generated through weapons production at DOE's Y-12 Plant in Oak Ridge.
Though constructed for that purpose, the lysimeters employed by the CEB/ORNL team had never been used. The circular cluster of lysimeters has an 18-foot-deep central core area from which researchers could monitor the progress of the organisms as they degraded contaminants in the soil.
A Light Diet
As the organisms degraded the naphthalene, they emitted light. Bundles of fiber-optic cables snaked from various points within the lysimeters to photomultipliers, which amplified the light and digitalized it for analysis by researchers.
The lysimeters were also equipped with other devices that monitor moisture, soil pH, temperature, and the presence of carbon dioxide and oxygen. These latter two compounds are influenced by the microorganisms' metabolic activity.
Naphthalene and other PAHs, which are derived from fossil fuels, are widely distributed in the environment and are regarded as potential carcinogens. The project allowed researchers to study environmental conditions that influence microorganisms' abilities to degrade contaminants present in the soil.
"Our primary expectation from this project was to understand how we could actually control microbial processes in the environment to achieve maximum levels of degradation," says CEB Director Gary Sayler, who served as co-principal investigator on the project.
A Glowing Success
The GEM release was successful in a variety of ways, most expected but with a few surprises. EPA’s initial environmental concerns, such as possible gene transfer from the genetically altered organisms to naturally occurring microorganisms, proved unfounded, and Sayler does not foresee that happening in future tests. According to Sayler, the GEMs performed exactly as expected in detecting and degrading the naphthalene.
One surprise involved the level of die-off of the organisms, says Robert Burlage, an ORNL microbiologist and one of the principal investigators on the project. According to Burlage, GEM populations declined from millions per gram to only a few hundred per gram but never reached a state of extinction.
In fact, the GEMs survived but at times reached such low levels that there was no visible light, primarily because most of the hydrocarbon pollutants had been degraded by that time. In that low state, it took very little manipulation to maintain them. In fact, the researchers did little more than feed them a little oxygen to keep them alive.
“The GEMs are essentially living in a starvation state,” Sayler says, “just waiting for something to come by so they can eat.”
Though the release was a success, and the research is now drawing significant attention, “there seems to be more interest in using the GEMs in ‘sentinel detection’ than for bioremediation,” Sayler says. Sentinel detection, or first-alert detection, of specific substances offers a variety of uses for the GEMs. One area of current research involves the use of GEMs in the detection of hazardous substances in space environments (see “Critters in Space,” InSites, Spring 2000). This use also has potential application in monitoring ailments related to “sick-building” syndrome.
One major bonus resulting from the GEMs release was the development of the test facility itself.
“The test parameters of the facility were a major part of the research,” Sayler acknowledges, “and although the facility is currently in an idle, maintenance mode, the project provided ORNL with a unique R&D facility for bioremediation testing.”
Previous tests of GEMs have been conducted only under strict laboratory settings, but because of EPA concerns about full field release of GEMs, and the uncertainty surrounding such an immediate transition from “laboratory-scale research to field-scale demonstration,” an intermediate-scale facility serves “an important function in the development of bioremediation technology,” according to Sayler. There are relatively few such facilities available for similar intermediate-scale tests.
GEMs in a Can
The number of lysimeters in this single location adds to the flexibility of the facility. One of the major disadvantages of field-scale demonstrations is the lack of variables that can be imposed on a single site. In field-scale studies, relatively few experiments can be conducted at one time due to site constrictions such as proximity to other experiments, size of contaminant area, and difficulty in maintaining consistent control over all variables.
By using the lysimeters at the ORNL site, researchers can alter variables in each lysimeter separately, without adversely affecting the others. For example, in the GEMs release, three of the lysimeters received both GEMs and naphthalene-contaminated soil, two control lysimeters received only the GEMs, and the last lysimeter received only the naphthalene-contaminated soil. This allowed for testing of the GEMs both with and without the presence of the targeted contaminant, thus expanding the research into the viability and survivability of the GEMs, as well as their effectiveness in detecting and consuming naphthalene.
The flexible nature of the facility could be especially useful in performing concurrent comparisons of different bioremediation techniques. Because each lysimeter is separate and complete within itself, the independent operation and monitoring of systems in each one would allow investigation of different contaminants and environmental factors as well as additional studies of GEMs designed for other industry-specific contaminants.
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For more information contact Gary Sayler, CEB, The University of Tennessee, 676 Dabney Hall, Knoxville, TN 37996-1605, or call 865-974-8080.
To reference the article “Controlled Field Release of a Bioluminescent Genetically Engineered Microorganism,” see the March 2000 edition (Vol. 34, No.5) of Environmental Science and Technology.
A UT research team is helping auto makers design and build cleaner cars.
By Janice S. Clifford
For decades, manufacturers and consumers regarded cars and pollution as part of a cause-and-effect relationship with little room for improvement. But today, more and more carmakers—led by Saturn Corporation—are taking their environmental responsibilities more seriously and are turning to innovative technologies to reduce the negative impacts of their products and production processes.
Among those technologies is a design software program developed by researchers at the University of Tennessee’s (UT) Center for Clean Products and Clean Technologies (CCPCT). CCPCT is a subunit of UT’s Energy, Environment and Resources Center.
For the last five years, CCPCT and Saturn Corporation have collaborated on developing the Life-Cycle Design Toolkit, a software package that will help carmakers reduce the impacts of an automobile through its entire life cycle, beginning with extraction of raw materials and ending with the car’s disposal or recycling. (See “Back to the Drawing Board,” InSites, Spring 1996).
The Toolkit allows automotive designers to calculate the environmental impacts associated with various options for myriad car parts and processes. As a result, according to CCPCT researcher Jonathan Overly, “manufacturers can add the environment to their list of important product aspects, which includes primarily safety, performance, and cost.”
This, Overly says, “enables the Toolkit’s users to look at the life-cycle environmental and human-health impacts of a product before it is manufactured and take that resulting information back to the design stage.”
From Cradle to Grave
The Toolkit makes use of a process called life-cycle assessment (LCA), which is composed of three interconnected parts. The first is the inventory, which involves an objective process of quantifying what goes into and comes out of a car as it is manufactured, driven, and discarded.
Inputs in the manufacturing stage, for example, include energy and raw materials. Outputs from that stage include water effluents, airborne emissions, and solid wastes. Inputs for the operation stage include, among other things, oil and gasoline, while outputs include tailpipe emissions.
Once the inventory stage has been completed, researchers can begin the impact-assessment stage, which essentially attaches a context or meaning to the inventories in terms of potential ecological damage or risk to human health over the lifetime of the product.
In simplest terms, the inventory and impact-assessment stages can be reduced to this progression: This is what goes into a car, this is what comes out, and this is what effect those inputs and outputs have.
The third leg of the life-cycle-assessment triangle, the product-improvement stage, employs the Toolkit. At this stage, designers begin to make changes in automobile design that will result in net environmental improvements.
"By the time we reach this stage, we know what pollutants automobiles are producing, we know what damage they cause, and we can begin to help designers make changes that will reduce that damage," says Lori Kincaid, CCPCT technical program manager.
Test Run
This past February, CCPCT researchers unveiled the software during a training session for participants in another project between Saturn and the CCPCT. The project, titled “Greening the Supply Chain,” aims to reduce the environmental burden of the Saturn component supply chain, and through this training session, the Toolkit was utilized by industry as well as beta tested.
“That training session was one of the first opportunities to get quality user feedback on how the Toolkit would perform,” says Overly. At the session, John Resslar, an executive with Saturn’s parent company, General Motors, who had worked for Saturn at the beginning of the project, joked, “When this all began, I couldn’t spell LCA. But LCA is the only tool to provide quantitative comparisons of a range of environmental burdens inherent in technological options.”
The software project has proven a daunting task. The project’s scope was enormous; more than 1,000 items, from chemicals to electricity, would be included in the inventory process alone. “To get a sense of the scale of this project,” says Overly, “imagine a process that begins by quantifying every input and output in the process of manufacturing an automobile, which itself comprises over 2,000 components.”
The challenge, he says, “was to start big and work down from there by first looking at everything in the process in terms of mass. “Everything,” according to Overly, “included primarily anything that represented 1 percent or more of the total weight of the automobile.”
The Toolkit, which is based on Microsoft’s Foxpro language, had a few obstacles to overcome, such as several small and a few large “bugs” that had to be tracked down and fixed. The process of bug detection and removal commonly associated with software development “was particularly prickly for this project because of the amount of flexibility incorporated into the Toolkit,” says Overly.
Although the original funding came from both Saturn and EPA, the Toolkit has expanded beyond the automotive industry. “The potential product applications are limitless, from transportation systems to toasters to toothbrushes,” Overly says. Already, new projects are being planned in conjunction with the Department of Energy, ORNL, and EPA.
CCPCT, in conjunction with EPA, is using the Toolkit to assess the environmental and human-health burdens of the two main types of computer displays in use today, cathode ray tubes and liquid crystal displays. With computers multiplying faster than rabbits, it is important to understand the impact a huge glut of monitors could have on the world market and environment.
The Toolkit, whether analyzing automobiles or toasters, offers manufacturers the opportunity to include the environment in the bottom line. In the global marketplace, impacts on the environment are often left out of manufacturers’ financial equations; the Toolkit establishes the environment as a vital factor in financial, as well as ecological, terms.
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For more information contact Jonathan Overly, CCPCT, The University of Tennessee, 311 Conference Center Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, or call 865-974-3625.
Sustainable development remains a valued, but elusive, goal. Reorienting the educational system may help communities articulate—and achieve—their visions of sustainability.
By Janice S. Clifford
Much of the world has embraced the notion of sustainable development, and more than eight major United Nations conferences have addressed the principle. Greatly simplified, sustainable development means that we meet our current needs without borrowing from future generations.
Most proponents of sustainable development have identified education, public awareness, and training as essential components, yet, until now, few instructional resources were available to communities intent on shaping a sustainable future.
The Education for Sustainable Development [ESD] Tool Kit, a Web-based process developed by University of Tennessee researcher Rosalyn McKeown, may change all that by guiding educators, community leaders, students, and concerned citizens through specific steps necessary for articulating a strategy for sustainable development.
“At the meetings of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development [UNCSD],” says McKeown, director of the Center for Geography and Environmental Education (CGEE), a subunit of UT’s Energy, Environment and Resources Center, “I noted frustration among my peers that the education component wasn’t advancing more rapidly, that no one had taken responsibility for it, and that no one seemed to know how or where to start.”
With those deficiencies in mind, McKeown conceived the ESD Tool Kit, which boasts four major components. The first describes ESD’s major elements and places emphasis on improving basic education in general as a prelude to reorienting existing education to incorporate sustainable development. The second component discusses 12 major barriers to the progress of ESD, including a lack of awareness and funding.
The Tool Kit’s third phase presents exercises to help schools reorient curricula to address sustainability, to help communities develop sustainability goals, and to help explain sustainability concepts.
The fourth presents a case study of the Toronto Board of Education’s community-wide visioning and consultation process, which resulted in significant curriculum revision and incorporation of principles of sustainable development.
McKeown maintains that the Toronto model is effective because it grew in response to community goals, challenges, and conditions.
“For education for sustainable development to work, communities must shape curricula that are locally and culturally relevant,” she says. “Any successful program must take into consideration local environmental, economic, and societal conditions.”
McKeown distributed the ESD Tool Kit in April at UNCSD’s annual meeting in New York. Because of the global nature of sustainable development,
McKeown designed the manual with a global audience in mind. Some areas of the world have access to older and slower equipment, which means the toolkit had to be “designed with a minimum of graphics so it would download rapidly. We wanted it to be visually attractive,” says McKeown, “without compromising quick and easy downloading.”
The ESD Tool Kit, while available in printed form from CGEE, features easy Web access and allows users to print out only those portions of the site that are applicable to their needs.
McKeown is already planning the next phase of the ESD Tool Kit. She would like to research and “document public-participation processes used by communities for creating local Agenda 21 initiatives and add a section on institutional obstacles to reorienting education to address sustainability.”
McKeown says the barriers must be addressed for the world to progress toward global environmental sustainability. The ESD Tool Kit provides guidance for overcoming those obstacles.
“The ESD Tool Kit represents a valuable resource in the overall global development of education as a driver for nations intent on achieving sustainability,” says Gustavo López Ospina, director of the Transdisciplinary Project of the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). “It will help prompt communities to discuss the importance of sustainability and pursue a process that will produce tangible and relevant results.”
In developing the ESD Tool Kit, McKeown received assistance from Charles A. Hopkins, who heads the UNESCO committee on reorienting teacher education to address sustainability.
From the ESD Web site, browsers can peruse the ESD Tool Kit on screen or reprint it in PDF format.
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For more information contact Rosalyn McKeown, EERC, The University of Tennessee, 311 Conference Center Building, Knoxville, Tennessee 37996-4234, or visit the ESD Tool Kit site at <http://www.esdtoolkit.org>.
EERC Publication Honored for Excellence
Forum for Applied Research and Public Policy, a quarterly policy journal published by the University of Tennessee’s Energy, Environment and Resources Center (EERC) along with the Tennessee Valley Authority and TVA Rural Studies at the University of Kentucky, recently received several awards.
"The Apex Awards honored Forum for “Publication Excellence” for 1998 and 1999. Forum also received the 1999 “Best of Show” award from the East Tennessee Chapter of the Society of Technical Communicators (STC/ETC) for Scholarly/Professional Journals.
EERC Research Leader Mary English won an “Award of Merit” in Technical Publications from STC/ETC for Tools to Aid Environmental Decision-Making, which she co-edited with Virginia H. Dale of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
PROJECTS.
EERC’s Center for Clean Products and Clean Technologies (CCPCT) has undertaken a life-cycle-based assessment of materials used in new-generation vehicles for Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) Energy Division. A previous study evaluated the life-cycle environmental impacts of two prototype vehicles built to meet the goals of the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, an initiative launched in 1993. The study identified a need for more in-depth assessment of certain new materials/components. CCPCT’s new project with ORNL will provide life-cycle analyses of fuel cells, lithium-ion batteries, and carbon-fiber composites intended for use in future vehicles. CCPCT Director Gary Davis and Research Associates Rajive Dhingra and Jonathan Overly expect to complete the project by the end of the year.
PRESENTATIONS.
Senior Research Scientist David Feldman, serving on the Southeast Water Supply Planning Panel, outlined strategies for improving the Southeast’s water supply practices and policies at the Tenth Annual Tennessee Water Resources Symposium. Senior Research Scientist Jack Ranney presented “An Ecologist’s Study on Sediment Control and Riparian Corridor Changes During Rural-to-Commercial Construction.” UT Assistant Professor Robert Jones (Sociology Department) and Senior Research Assistant Ruth Anne Hanahan of EERC’s Water Resources Research Center (WRRC) presented “Public Views on Local Watershed Issues.” Graduate Research Assistant Jeff Duncan of WRRC presented “Homogenization of Tennessee’s Aquatic Biodiversity: Assessing the Past and Predicting the Future.”
In addition, Duncan served as keynote speaker for the Third Annual Tennessee Clean Water Network Conference in Nashville, where he presented “Trends in Tennessee’s Aquatic Biodiversity: Learning from the Past and Predicting the Future.” Laura Duncan, a research assistant with WRRC, organized a session titled “Empowering Watershed Organizations: How to increase the Effectiveness of Watershed Organizations through Participation and Planning.” Research Specialist Kimberly Davis, EERC Faculty Associate Mary Rogge (College of Social Work), and graduate assistant Vina Clark (College of Social Work) presented a report on the progress of a WMREI-sponsored project led by Rogge and Davis to identify and document concerns about the existence of and perceived risk from neighborhood toxins.
PUBLICATIONS.
Senior Research Associate Catherine Wilt, along with Garth Hickle of the Minnesota Office of Environmental Assistance, recently published “A State Approach to Product Stewardship” in Resource Recycling (Dec 1999), which discusses state policies on extended producer responsibility. Such policies are designed to manage problem waste streams through life-cycle analysis, product design, and recovery or recycling. Many states are asking product manufacturers and users to bear the financial costs of managing product wastes.
