By Kate Kellogg
News and Information Services
The National Center for Pollution Prevention at the U-M has received an AT&T Industrial Ecology Faculty Fellowship to advance the Center’s education and research activities in the emerging field of industrial ecology.
The $50,000 fellowship, one of six awarded nationally, builds upon an existing research collaboration between AT&T and the Center, housed in the School of Natural Resources and Environment. The U-M fellows are Jon-athan Bulkley, Center director and professor of natural resources and of civil and environmental engineering, and Center Manager Gregory A. Keoleian.
“Advocates of industrial ecology are trying to incorporate risk reduction into the design of a product rather than coming around afterward with a dustpan and broom,” Keoleian says. “This important component of sustainable development requires the coordinated efforts of suppliers, manufacturers, consumers, regulators and educators to reduce environmental burdens associated with products and production processes.”
The fellowship’s education component will help the Center develop an interdisciplinary course, “Industrial Ecology Theory and Practice,” for graduate and senior-level undergraduates in engineering, business, industrial design, natural resources policy and management, and environmental health sciences.
“By focusing on ecology, this field of study provides a passageway to other sectors,” said Bulkley. “We, at the Center, feel fortunate to be selected as the focus of this effort.”
Bulkley and Keoleian will design an industrial ecology module of the educational materials developed for the course and disseminate the module nationally through the Center’s faculty network.
The grant also will help the Center conduct further research on principles and tools for reducing environmental impacts and health risks through product system design. The Center will collaborate in this effort with the Center for High-Definition Display Technologies at the College of Engineering.
“The two U-M centers will work together to investigate the environmental impact of the use of high definition display systems and to design products that minimize any adverse impacts,” Keoleian explains.
Since the purpose of industrial ecology is to simultaneously minimize environmental impacts and meet industrial needs, “it is important for us to have industry support in our development of tools to implement principles of industrial ecology,” Keoleian adds.
AT&T researchers at Bell Laboratories in Princeton, N.J., already are participating in a demonstration project that is evaluating the Center’s Life Cycle Design Manual. It focuses on development of a “green” business telephone that has a lower environmental burden associated with its manufacture, use and retirement. Keoleian is documenting and evaluating AT&T’s application of the manual to test its use in an industrial setting.
Life cycle design for conservation “is the new key to competitiveness,” says Joseph Morabito, director of environmental health and safety for AT&T’s Bell Laboratories and a member of the Center’s Advisory Board. “New standards for waste minimization and emissions levels are requiring companies to rethink their whole manufacturing process.”
The five other universities that receive Industrial Ecology Fellowships are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, Princeton University, Spelman College, and the University of California, Los Angeles.
