SGD Attends Annual Life Cycle Assessment Conference

Faculty and students of SGD attended the Life Cycle Assessment X Conference held November 2-4 in Portland, OR.

SGD was well-represented with 5 student posters and 3 student presentations on topics such as:

• Effects of product lifetime on LCA results (Can Aktas shown presenting to the right)
• Use of LCA in green product labeling
• Sustainability metrics in power plant cooling systems' wastewater
• LCA of soybean-based biodiesels (Xiaobo Xue shown presenting poster to the left)
• LCA of green buildings

Attendees were also inspired by Portland itself! The public transportation was very efficient and the city was full of community spaces and older buildings that had been renovated with new (and renewable) technologies. Even places like fast-food restaurants had recyclable or biodegradable wrapping and locally-grown produce.

Apple Picking!

Well it's fall and before the first frost bites, a few of the SGD students went on an outing to a local apple orchard. The misty morning stayed dry enough to walk along the hillside grabbing red delicious, empire, and ida reds right off the tree.

We didn't venture into the pumpkin patch, but the colorful trees kept us thinking of autumn and fall festivities. Now our bags of apples keep us thinking of pies and turnovers, crisps and sauce!

Greening the Greenhouse: Fresh in the Fall

As the school year starts back up, so does SGD's partnership with Shaler Area High School. Shaler's greenhouse (pictured above) was erected over the summer and is ready for its green add-ons, provided with help from an MCSI Community Grant.


With all the materials ready, Shaler High School students and SGD graduate students spent a half day assembling all the components and laying out the site.

New additions to the greenhouse include:

• Solar Panels
• Small Wind Turbine
• 2 Compost Bins
• A Rain Barrel

And will hopefully provide Shaler Students with year-round, hands-on sustainable learning.

Shaler students assemble the wind turbine.

Shaler students with the assembled solar panels.










SGD and Shaler students assemble a compost bin. Two bins were purchased for the project- a large, manual bin, and a smaller tumbler bin.













As can be seen in the photos, work is not yet completed, so expect more updates as the semester continues!

SGD Lab Spring Cleaning & Construction

The SGD group spent Monday 'spring cleaning' the lab. Actually, we spend most of our time building stuff; and we had a blast! We built a mock wall section so that students can experiment with different types of insulation with different R-values. We'll use the IR camera to measure the heat transfer through the walls. Students can also experiment in designing different types of insulation.

Monica and Kristen built the wall section; it's three studs wide with drywall on the interior side and siding on the exterior side. In this pic they're cutting insulation samples for students to experiment with.

We built frames for experimenting with different types of aggregate for sustainable concrete (Scott and Aziz are putting the frames together at right). We also built mini-shake tables for students to compete in building the tallest jenga-structure possible. (Jacob and Alex are putting the shake tables together at left).

And of course, there was massive organization of all of our supplies in the lab. Xi, Kullapa, Xiaobo are working hard labeling, organizing, and building shelves, and cleaning (below)!

We have three grants that support the development of our educational activities; Pitt's Innovation in Educational Excellence Award, a grant from NCIIA for course innovation, and a course improvement grant from NSF.

New NSF Funding: Course Improvement Grant

Drs. Landis and Bilec in collaboration with Dr. Rizzo of Pitt's CEE Structures group were just awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to 'Integrate Sustainability into the Civil Engineering Curriculum Through Three Courses at the University of Pittsburgh.' We will be developing cross-course curriculum and laboratory activities for Design for the Environment (DfE), Introduction to Nondestructive Evaluation and Structural Health Monitoring (NDE), and Green Buildings: Design and Construction. (See our education page for more info on our classes.)

Some examples of these innovative educational activities include teaching students in all three courses to conduct energy audits of buildings using Infrared Thermography. Students will also be installing sensors in the new building housing the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation in order to monitor indoor air quality in buildings.

Students Maria Fer Padilla and Kullapa Soratana using the IR Camera.
Dr. Landis (PI), Dr. Bilec, and Dr. Rizzo (Co-PIs, L to R).

Advanced Biofuels Leadership Conference

The ABLC commenced this morning with invigorating presentations from the DC legislation. Invigorating because they all called for the biofuels company leaders present to make sure that what they're doing is truly sustainable. YES! That's what we're about at SGD!

While this is exciting, Valri Lightner of DOE noted that there aren't defined or agreed upon sustainability indicators or metrics. DOE grants and loans don't require companies to prove that they are exploring sustainable technologies or at the very least are monitoring sustainability. Hello... Life Cycle Assessment people!!

While metrics aren't defined by the agencies, I think that there are some clearly unarguable ones:

• don't use more feedstock than is available
• don't increase life cycle GWP or water emissions
  
• don't increase tailpipe emissions
  

and some tips:

• monitor those tradeoffs!
• diversify your portfolio- don't look for that silver bullet solution in just cellulose or just algae.

more to come as the Conference progresses...

We are under Construction

We're just getting started... give us a few days to update the pages and links.
-Amy Landis, Assistant Professor, Sustainability & Green Design at Pitt