Research Publications

Purpose While there has been considerable effort to understand the environmental impact of a food or diet, nutritional effects are not usually included in food-related life cycle assessment (LCA)...

Street lighting plays an important role in the human landscape, providing public safety and place-making benefits. However, it is also the largest energy expense for many municipalities and accounts f...

The School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE) team engaged with Meijer, Inc. to assess the environmental impacts of its core business activities, to develop an Environmental Commitment and...

Approximately 84 million Americans spend their days in colleges, universities, and public or private primary and secondary schools.   The commercial building sector, which includes education...

Environmental concerns are growing in today’s societies, and governments, companies, and other organizations are looking to decrease the impacts on the environment from their products and the produ...

Energy storage devices, such as batteries and flywheels, are promising options for providing operating reserves due to their fast response and low emissions during operation. However, because of th...

Global Forest Partners (GFP) is a forestry investment advisor that manages over 750,000 hectares of timberland around the globe on behalf of their investors. The primary objective of this analysis was...

This report provides a ‘handbook’ approach to ecological and water-­sensitive design in order to guide the incorporation of environmental resilience into the work of SPD (Beijing) International Urban ...

This study analyses ex-ante socio-economic impacts of biogas systems using a remote rural community in Ghana as a case study. An analysis was performed for a 300 m3 bio-digester that relies on crop...

We developed this project in response to a growing local­level demand for information and guidance on accessing local, state, and federal energy financing programs. Knowledge regarding these programs ...

Cattle ranching in Brazil is a key driver of deforestation and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The Brazilian government plans to reduce national GHG emissions by at least 36%, partly by reducing emiss...

Russian forest resources are important for global carbon cycling. In contrast to traditional analyses that focus on the harvest and direct use of Russian timber resources (a.k.a. production-based a...

Fostering resilience in the face of environmental, socioeconomic, and political uncertainty and risk has captured the attention of academics and decision makers across disciplines, sectors, and sca...

Task 1. Initial literature scan; first draft of results: Contractor will identify and review in summary fashion existing literature evaluating the life cycle environmental impacts of foods. Contractor...

Task 2. First draft of recommendations: Contractor will prepare a separate document containing its recommendations for which food types (commodities) to study in further detail. For the purpose of thi...

Financial barriers are often cited as the principle impediment to the adoption of energy efficiency measures. Since 1976, the US Department of Energy's Weatherisation Assistance Programme (WAP) has pr...

This article develops a modeling approach for estimating emissions (e.g., carbon dioxide) from nuclear, coal, natural gas, and hydropower generators in reaction to short‐term changes to electricity...

Different attitudes and practices toward WEEE recovery and recycling are found in developed and developing countries. As the largest developing country in the world, China's WEEE is widely regarded as...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) measures cradle-to-grave environmental impacts of a product. To assess impacts of an emerging technology, LCA should be coupled with additional methods that estimate how...

Energy storage technologies represent a potential solution for several grid applications suchas integration of renewables and deferring investments in transmission and distribution infrastructure. ...

Food packaging has long served a role in protecting and preserving both perishable and shelf-stable foods, but sustainability efforts aimed at reducing the environmental impact of packaging typically ...

To develop industry-specific policies for mitigating environmental pressures, previous studies primarily focus on identifying sectors that directly generate large amounts of environmental pressures...

The generation of scrap fluorescent lamps in China has increased greatly in recent years, and the improper disposal of mercury-containing waste has posed a major risk to residents' health. This pap...

Existing studies examined the U.S.’s direct GHG emitters and final consumers driving upstream GHG emissions, but overlooked the U.S.’s primary suppliers enabling downstream GHG emissions and relati...