Second Annual Michael Horman Workshop

University of Pittsburgh's Sustainability and Green

Design group hosted the 2nd annual Michael Horman Workshop on April 13, 2011. The workshop brought together students from University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon, Virginia Tech, and Clemson University to discuss their ongoing research in the field of sustainability.

Students shared research ideas, objectives, challenges, and successes and, hopefully, also developed lasting bonds that will encourage continued collaborative relationships throughout the rest of their academic and professional careers. Students also toured Pitt SGD's lab spaces and engineering facility.

Last year's workshop was hosted by Virginia Tech.

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.

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...