Research Publications

While the modern food industry has always concerned itself with maintaining food safety and quality, the moral imperative of feeding a rapidly growing population, combined with a maturing recognition ...

Kellogg Company sources agricultural commodities from around the world to manufacture its products; the company is committed to enhancing the natural resources and livelihoods of the areas and peop...

This paper examines how schoolyard design in low resource communities can create a natural, restorative environment to not only foster learning, but also trauma recovery. Research has shown that natur...

Resilience is an increasingly popular concept in academic research and public discourse and is closely connected to complex systems theory. This article reviews research on resilience and complexit...

Many have witnessed the increasing popularity of “big data” in the past couple of years. Indeed, big data has been transforming how business is done in many industries. For example, online advertis...

The importance of understanding supply chain sustainability is being realized by increasingly more people, including corporate managers, investors, policy makers, customers and other stakeholders. A l...

Traditional production- and consumption-based accounting frameworks for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions focus on the two ends of supply chains, treating intermediate sectors as a “black box.” Partic...

Situated in northern Michigan, Northport and Leelanau Township comprise a small community with a significant tourist industry, agricultural presence and natural beauty. A local non-profit, Northport E...

Kellogg Company sources agricultural commodities from around the world to manufacture its products; the company is committed to enhancing the natural resources and livelihoods of the areas and peop...

This special issue brings together articles that illustrate the recent advances of studying complex adaptive systems in industrial ecology (IE). The authors explore the emergent behavior of sociote...

Emerging products and technologies pose unique challenges for the life cycle assessment (LCA) community, given the lack of data and inherent uncertainties regarding their development. An emerging t...

Growing heterotrophic algae in reactors with sugar as the energy and carbon source rather than sunlight and carbon dioxide is an approach being commercialized today. However, the full environmental...

It is critical to alleviate problems of energy and air pollutants emissions in the metropolis because these areas serve as economic engines and have large and dense populations. Drivers of fossil f...

Representing the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions attributable to plug-in electric vehicles (PEV) in vehicle GHG emissions regulations is complex because of spatial and temporal variation in fueling ...

Transition of the current gasoline-based transportation system into a renewable fuel-based clean vehicle system has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve national energy secu...

Twenty-nine states have binding Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS), which have served as key drivers for renewable energy development. In 2008, Michigan adopted the Clean, Renewable, and Efficient En...

Micro-grid system management considering air pollutant control and carbon dioxide (CO2) mitigation is a challenging task, since many system parameters such as electric demand, resource availability...

The use of renewable energies for electricity generation is necessary to reach the US government goals for reducing their CO2 emissions. One of the key technologies is wind energy. It is an abundant r...

This thesis is organized into two chapters, which will be submitted separately for publication. The abstracts for each chapter are given below. Chapter 1: Many state-level Renewable Portfolio Stand...

This paper considers the limits and potential of ‘urban metabolism’ to conceptualize city processes. Three ‘ecologies’ of urban metabolism have emerged. Each privileges a particular dimension of ...

Charging infrastructure is critical to the development of electric vehicle (EV) system. While many countries have implemented great policy efforts to promote EVs, how to build charging infrastructu...

This paper develops a political–industrial ecology approach to explore the urban water metabolism of Los Angeles, which sprawls for thousands of miles across the American West. Conventional approaches...

Although essential to understand the overall health impact of a food or diet, nutrition is not usually considered in food-related life cycle assessments (LCAs). As a case study to demonstrate comparin...