Program

Technical Program

Monday morning, January 10, 2011

Plenary Session:  Perspectives of Industrial Sustainability

The opening plenary session will set the stage for the Congress, which will provide a common platform to practitioners of various physical and ecological sciences, engineering fields, economics, and social sciences for exchanging emerging ideas about ways and means of protecting the environment and its resource depletion so that humans can achieve sustained economic growth and societal benefits through generations. The invited speakers in this session will provide insights into what the sustainability challenges are to corporations and what they are currently doing and planning to do to meet those challenges.

Monday afternoon, January 10, 2011

Session 1: Sustainable Natural Resource Management

            Session Chair: Bruce Hamilton, NSF and Mary Poulton, University of Arizona

This session deals with understanding and managing natural resource systems for sustainability.  Natural resources such as ecosystems that support life and primary energy resources that support standard of living are managed by sophisticated technologies.  These systems often tend to be complex with multiple sustainability objectives.  These presentations will feature methods of integrating these often conflicting objectives by means of models and technologies.

Session 2: Sustainable Manufacturing                 

            Session Chair: I.S. Jawahir, University of Kentucky and Shaw Feng, NIST

This session concerns how process design and manufacturing provide improvement towards sustainability.  The presentation will address advanced process design and manufacturing methodologies, along with technologies and tools for sustainability applications and evaluation of manufacturing processes.

Session 3: Sustainable Materials, Processing and Product Design                             

            Session Chair: Glenn Schrader, University of Arizona and Katie Hunt, DOW

The focus of this session is to highlight the innovations being made in designing newer materials and products to achieve broader sustainability objectives beyond environmental “green”ness.  The newer innovations in material use and reuse and recyclability and those in the fields of nanotechnology and biotechnology are featured.

Tuesday morning, January 11, 2011

Session 4: Sustainability through Green Chemistry and Engineering 

            Session Chair: Nhan Nguyen, EPA and Bob Peoples, Green Chemistry Institute

The principles of green chemistry and engineering in fostering sustainability of processes and products are the drivers for presentations in this session.  Of particular interest is designing chemical and biochemical conversions to reduce energy use, material use and to prevent environmental pollution.

Session 5: Product Life Cycle Assessment – Recycle/Reuse/Remanufacturing                                

Session Chair: MaryAnn Curran, EPA, and L.E. Oliveira, UNICAMP-Universidade Estadula de Campinas

This session will provide discussion on how life cycle thinking and assessment is influencing the development and use of sustainable products and processes that provide transparency in evaluating improvements in economic, environmental, and societal impacts of anthropogenic activities.  Tools and methods that incorporate LCA methodologies are to be featured in this session.

Session 6: Sustainable Supply Chain                                                       

            Session Chair: Doug Young, EPA

Supply chain spans all movement and storage of raw materials, work-in-process inventory, and finished goods from point of origin to point of consumption (supply chain).  As we examine sustainability from a systems perspective, it is essential to consider the supply chain associated with the man-made products and processes. In this session the interaction of the roles of feedstock development and procurement, manufacture, associated transportation and retail issues will be reviewed in terms of environmental, societal, and economic impacts.

Tuesday afternoon, January 11, 2010

Session 7: Metrics for Sustainability                                                        

            Session Chair: Beth Beloff, BRIDGES to Sustainability Institute and Herb Cabezas, EPA

Metrics for Sustainability – Applications for better decision making

      · Communities and Regions

      · Corporations

      · Supply Chains

      · Industrial processes

      · Consumers

Session 8: Standards and Protocols                                                                    

            Session Chair: Lyn Beary, NIST

This session examines how sustainability can best be incorporated into standards which typically represent an agreed upon practice that is commonly used?  Will codes and possible regulations be a driver or an obstacle for evolution and implementation of sustainable best practices?  Topics of green certification and standard frameworks, materials and processes will be explored, along with the role of standard setting bodies from a national and international framework.

Session 9: Sustainable Built Environment

            Session Chair: Eric Amis, United Technologies and Verle Hansen, EPA

This session will feature presentations on design and architecture of urban environment and ecosystems that support quality of life.  The topic is dominated, in the case of buildings, by energy and water use footprints, but design of urban environment and ecosystems depends on other issues such as demographics, congestion, transportation, waste handling, and nutrient flows.

Special Display Poster Session

General Posters: Posters are a significant part of the exchange of ideas among experts in this Congress.  Posters will be displayed with authors present in allocated time in two separate days. The general posters will subscribe to the objectives of the Congress as described in the session objectives.

Wednesday morning, January 12, 2011

Session 10: Non-fossil Fuels for Transportation                                                

            Session Chair: Humberto Brandi, Brazil

This session will examine alternatives to petroleum as a transportation fuel. The transportation sector of the economy is dominated by liquid fuels of petroleum origin.  The concerns for the emission of global warming fossil carbon to the atmosphere together with rapid price increase of petroleum have created an unprecedented opportunity for developing and commercializing non-fossil fuel-dependent transportation. As a result, the environmental, economic, and societal impacts of these alternatives have become a focus for scrutiny.

Session 11: Sustainable Water Management

            Session Chair: Vince Tidwell, SANDIA and Tay Joo Hua, Fudan University, China

Water resources management for satisfying the current and future needs of society and industry for a region is the focus of this session.  The presentations will provide the current developments in our understanding of the severity of the both availability and quality of water resources and how to make sure these resources will remain accessible to us in the future.

Session 12: Teaching and Educational Programs in Sustainability

            Session Chair: Cliff Davidson, Carnegie Mellon University and Yinlun Huang, Wayne State

Sustainability as a concept is not generally appreciated by most practitioners of science and technology.  The aim of this session is to engage in discussions on how to foster the development of a scientific approach to sustainability within academic curricula for preparing future innovators.

Special Display Poster Session

Student Posters: Students are encouraged to present posters on any of the topics described by the sessions. Best posters will be awarded with cash prizes and plaques at the Congress Banquet.

Wednesday afternoon, January 12, 2011

Session 13: Advances in Low Carbon Power Generation

            Session Chair: Frank Princiotta, EPA and Hamid Arastoopour, Wanger Institute for Sustainability, IIT

This session will focus on the scientific and technological state of the art and needed breakthroughs in order to have sustainable solutions for power from both fossil and non-fossil sources.  The dominant issues in this topic will be addressed in this oral session and will be supplemented by the poster session to address the remaining sectors and issues.

Session 14: Sustainable Water Technologies

            Session Chair: Shane Snyder, Southern Nevada Water Authority & University of Arizona and Makram Suidan, University of Cincinnati

This session will deal with advanced technologies for producing clean water for the increasing needs of society and industry.  With the decline of water quality on much of the planet, the urgent need is to develop technologies that provide the product as affordable costs.

Session 15: Sustainable Ecosystems Engineering                                             

            Session Chair: Herbert Fredrickson, EPA

This session will deal with papers that embody engineering approaches to protect life supporting ecosystems from irreparably getting degraded because of pollution and development.  The approaches to achieving that goal would be a combination of modeling engineering and societal systems while appreciating the natural resiliency of such ecosystems.

Special Display Poster Session

General Posters: Posters are a significant part of the exchange of ideas among experts in this Congress.  Posters will be displayed with authors present in allocated time in two separate days. The general posters will subscribe to the objectives of the Congress as described in the session objectives.

Professional Program Schedule