Research Publications

Pewabic is a not-for-profit ceramic studio and pottery school in Detroit, Michigan.  The organization employs full- and part-time ceramic artists and technicians to produce a variety of vessels a...

International trade separates the consumption of goods and services from their production as well as human health impacts associated with production-based environmental emissions. It is one of the ...

Estimating the embodied emissions in electricity has been a challenge due to the interconnectedness of electrical grids. Previous studies use a variety of methods that are often inaccurate or diffi...

Car-sharing companies have shown increasing support in the adoption of fuel efficient cars to reduce CO2 emissions and to meet heterogeneous demand. In this paper, we consider location design and r...

Existing studies on the evaluation of CO2 emissions due to electricity consumption in China are inaccurate and incomplete. This study uses a network approach to calculate CO2 emissions of purchased...

The environmental and social problems related to global production and consumption are matters of concern. One component of this is how the express delivery industry is continuing to grow and devel...

Large-scale energy storage may effectively meet the needs of several grid applications. However, understanding the environmental impact of energy storage for these grid applications is challenging ...

Urban systems draw on food, energy, and water outside of their physical boundaries, and create environmental impacts which extend beyond city borders. All three of these resources face growing dema...

Rural renewable electrification in Liberia is a key component for the development of the country.  The Rural and Renewable Energy Agency has taken leadership in promoting this sector.  With ...

What is urban resilience and how can we make cities resilient in the face of environmental and socioeconomic threats in a way that is sustainable and just? Despite the rapid growth of publications and...

Generation of and demand for electricity must match in real time for the electricity grid to operate reliably. To correct for mismatches, system operators deploy a suite of ancillary services, incl...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) measures the environmental impacts of a product in its whole life cycle from resource extraction through disposal. A good LCA study relies on the availability and qualit...

Research has demonstrated that traditional lecture-based instruction in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics leads to inferior student performance and increased failure rates when comp...

Automated vehicles (AVs) are becoming commercial reality, expected to revolutionize transportation sector and the way vehicles interact with their environment. Similar to other emerging technologie...

Extended producer responsibility (EPR) is important to achieve a sustainable recycling-oriented circular economy system because EPR can guarantee that recycling companies obtain average profit margins...

One method to reduce wind variability is to diversify the wind power resource by interconnecting wind resources across a larger geography. This study uses a modified version of mean-variance portfo...

Residential energy conservation and efficiency programs are strategic interventions to reduce consumption and increase affordability. However, the inability to identify and distinguish between high...

This paper introduces a mixed method approach for analyzing the determinants of natural latex yields and the associated spatial variations and identifying the most suitable regions for producing latex...

Dietary choices affect both health and the environment. Few studies, and none in the USA, have examined these links at the individual level, limiting our ability to describe the variation in respon...

This study assesses the environmental impacts of different plastic film waste recyclingsystems using life-cycle assessment. Three collection scenarios, urban area curbside collection, rural area curbs...

The purpose of this study was to perform a comparative lifecycle analysis of low sulfur diesel, compressed natural gas, and electric baggage tractors for United Airlines’ seven domestic hubs (SFO, LAX...

This practicum was conducted for Northport Energy Action Taskforce (NEAT) and Levin Energy Partners as an opus requirement for the Master of Science degree in the School of Natural Resources and Envir...

Zero waste and sustainable materials management (SMM) are two ways of reframing the process of waste management, by envisioning waste as potentially useful material. Detroit has taken a step towards S...