skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


  • NSF Public Access
  • Search Results
  • Sourcing Energy from Waste in the Circular City: Integrated Anaerobic Digestion Toward Long-Term Decarbonization of Cities
Title: Sourcing Energy from Waste in the Circular City: Integrated Anaerobic Digestion Toward Long-Term Decarbonization of Cities
Energy use within buildings contributes to nearly a third of carbon emissions in the United States (Zhang et al. 2019, EPA). Meanwhile, between 30-40% of food in the U.S. is wasted and generates carbon emissions equivalent to that of 37 million cars yearly (UN FAO). Long term decarbonization strategies within the built environment can look to alternative energy mechanisms which redirect waste resources as inputs to other systems. Circular City models of sustainability accordingly look for potentials to close loops, turning waste into resources and reducing pollution. These approaches are generating increasing interest and seek to advance a very applied approach to sustainability- one which will integrally require leadership from design fields, local governments, and community leadership to succeed.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1832213
PAR ID:
10376774
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Editor(s):
Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture 
Date Published:
Journal Name:
2020 AIA/ACSA Intersections Research Conference: CARBON
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 8
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; (, Water Environment Research)
    Abstract The Twin Falls, Idaho wastewater treatment plant (WWTP), currently operates solely to achieve regulatory permit compliance. Research was conducted to evaluate conversion of the WWTP to a water resource recovery facility (WRRF) and to assess the WRRF environmental sustainability; process configurations were evaluated to produce five resources—reclaimed water, biosolids, struvite, biogas, and bioplastics (polyhydroxyalkanoates, PHA). PHA production occurred using fermented dairy manure. State‐of‐the‐art biokinetic modeling, performed using Dynamita's SUMO process model, was coupled with environmental life cycle assessment to quantify environmental sustainability. Results indicate that electricity production via combined heat and power (CHP) was most important in achieving environmental sustainability; energy offset ranged from 43% to 60%, thereby reducing demand for external fossil fuel‐based energy. While struvite production helps maintain a resilient enhanced biological phosphorus removal (EBPR) process, MgO2production exhibits negative environmental impacts; integration with CHP negates the adverse consequences. Integrating dairy manure to produce bioplastics diversifies the resource recovery portfolio while maintaining WRRF environmental sustainability; pilot‐scale evaluations demonstrated that WRRF effluent quality was not affected by the addition of effluent from PHA production. Collectively, results show that a WRRF integrating dairy manure can yield a diverse portfolio of products while operating in an environmentally sustainable manner. Practitioner pointsWastewater carbon recovery via anaerobic digestion with combined heat/power production significantly reduces water resource recovery facility (WRRF) environmental emissions.Wastewater phosphorus recovery is of value; however, struvite production exhibits negative environmental impacts due to MgO2production emissions.Bioplastics production on imported organic‐rich agri‐food waste can diversify the WRRF portfolio.Dairy manure can be successfully integrated into a WRRF for bioplastics production without compromising WRRF performance.Diversifying the WRRF products portfolio is a strategy to maximize resource recovery from wastewater while concurrently achieving environmental sustainability. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; (, Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability)
    Abstract Contemporary food and agricultural systems degrade soils, pollute natural resources, and contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. The waste output from these systems, however, can be repurposed as an agricultural input, reducing emissions associated with organics disposal while actively sequestering atmospheric carbon in soils—thus transitioning the sector from a carbon source to a carbon sink. This research estimates the near-term technical and economic potential of utilizing composted organic feedstocks as a soil amendment to mitigate climate change and improve long-term soil quality, in line with California’s organics diversion policies, by connecting food scraps and organics residuals in California’s municipal solid waste to existing infrastructure and working lands in the state. The multi-objective spatial optimization results indicate considerable carbon sequestration benefits in the range of −1.9 ± 0.5 MMT CO2eq annually, by applying compost to 6 million hectares of California rangelands at a price of approximately $200 per ton, presenting a cost-effective climate change mitigation strategy within proposed federal sequestration credits. Expanding composting capacity is predicted to increase the total amount of carbon sequestered while reducing the cost per ton and per hectare treated. This model aids decision makers in considering the technical, economic, and institutional potential of actively managing the State’s organic materials in municipal waste streams for climate change mitigation. 
    more » « less
  3. ; (, Open Access Government)
    Sustainable urban systems and just FEW nexus transitions Water, food, and energy systems are providing fundamental services for human wellbeing. However, the current management of these systems is often wasteful, creating inefficiencies that need to be urgently addressed to reduce the over-consumption of our limited natural resources. Here, Jana Fried, Adina Paytan and Waste FEW ULL project participants look at lessons from the Waste FEW ULL project for reducing waste and increasing efficiency in the FEW nexus. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; (, ACM Journal on Computing and Sustainable Societies)
    Reducing buildings’ carbon emissions is an important sustainability challenge. While scheduling flexible building loads has been previously used for a variety of grid and energy optimizations, carbon footprint reduction using such flexible loads poses new challenges since such methods need to balance both energy and carbon costs while also reducing user inconvenience from delaying such loads. This article highlights the potential conflict between electricity prices and carbon emissions and the resulting tradeoffs in carbon-aware and cost-aware load scheduling. To address this tradeoff, we propose GreenThrift, a home automation system that leverages the scheduling capabilities of smart appliances and knowledge of future carbon intensity and cost to reduce both the carbon emissions and costs of flexible energy loads. At the heart of GreenThrift is an optimization technique that automatically computes schedules based on user configurations and preferences. We evaluate the effectiveness of GreenThrift using real-world carbon intensity data, electricity prices, and load traces from multiple locations and across different scenarios and objectives. Our results show that GreenThrift can replicate the offline optimal and retains 97% of the savings when optimizing the carbon emissions. Moreover, we show how GreenThrift can balance the conflict between carbon and cost and retain 95.3% and 85.5% of the potential carbon and cost savings, respectively. 
    more » « less
  5. (, Open Access Government)
    The research experiences for undergraduates (REU) programGreg M. Swain, hailing from the Department of Chemistry at Michigan State University, examines cross-disciplinary training in sustainable chemistry and chemical processes, including the critical role of mentoring and finding research experiences for undergraduates. Sustainability is the practice of reducing the environmental impacts of human existence and conserving natural resources for future generations. Green chemistry is a part of the sustainability approach that encourages manufacturing processes and the design of products that minimize the use and generation of hazardous substances. Stated another way, sustainable chemistry and chemical processes should use resources, including energy and raw materials, “at a rate at which they can be replaced naturally, and the generation” of waste cannot be faster than the rate of their remediation, as Horváth IT points out. (1) 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email