Research Publications

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is widely used to evaluate product environmental impacts, while detailed LCAs are missing that model the effect of design and manufacturing decisions on U.S. ductile iron c...

New approaches are needed to both reduce and reuse plastic waste. In this context, poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC) is an appealing target as it is the least recycled high-production-volume polymer due to i...

Unabated coal power in India must be phased out by mid-century to achieve global climate targets under the Paris Agreement. Here we estimate the costs of hybrid power plants—lithium-ion battery storag...

We review over 60 “visioning documents” authored by non-profits and frontline community members in the United States. These visions of energy justice – authored by the actors and communities that have...

Rationale and objective: This study was conducted by The Center for Sustainable Systems at University of Michigan to provide environmental performance of replacing meat consumption with consumption of...

The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the need for scholars to rethink how cities and urban spaces create and reproduce disproportionate social outcomes. The social, economic, and public health effects of ...

Persistent, systemic harms have resulted in inequalities in wealth distribution, energy insecurity, infrastructure reliability, heat island exposure, and preexisting health conditions, all of which ha...

Over the last decade, the life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology has significantly advanced to enable more realistic impact simulations and predictions with spatial and temporal considerati...

The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) intends to issue a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) entitled “Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs” (H2Hubs) in collaboration ...

Application of lake models coupled within earth-system prediction models, especially for predictions from days to weeks, requires accurate initialization of lake temperatures. Commonly used methods to...

Urban agriculture, experiencing a resurgence across the Global North, features prominently in food system sustainability and urban resilience discourse, planning, and policy. Research, however, indica...

The United States Postal Service (USPS) plans to purchase 165,000 next-generation delivery vehicles (NGDVs) between 2023 and 2032. The USPS submitted an environmental impact statement (EIS) for two NG...

Hormone laboratories located “on-site” where field studies are being conducted have a number of advantages. On-site laboratories allow hormone analyses to proceed in near-real-time, minimize logistics...

To further a just energy transition, jobs lost at retiring coal plants could be replaced by jobs at wind and solar plants. No research quantifies the feasibility and costs of such an undertaking acros...

This paper presents a quantitative framework to support policy decision-making around equitable energy interventions. By combining sociodemographic and techno-economic models in the energy space, we p...

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the growth of e-commerce and automated warehouses, vehicles, and robots and has created new options for grocery supply chains. We report and compare the greenhous...

The thermal modification (TM) process has been developed as an alternative to chemical treatment of wood, which increases longevity of lumber used in exterior non-ground-contact applications. In one a...

Energy system models underpin decisions by energy system planners and operators. Energy system modeling faces a transformation: accounting for changing meteorological conditions im...

Electric and hydrogen vehicles can help decarbonize heavy duty vehicles (HDV). Few studies examine how to meet energy requirements of decarbonized HDVs, and all assume electricity will come from centr...

Lockdown and social-distancing policy drove U.S. workers to switch to telecommuting during the pandemic of Covid-19 in 2020. Telecommuting has been widely perceived as a sustainable way of working tha...

This article aims to present a diagnosis of the barriers to the transfer of technologies generated in universities to society. To this end, a bibliographical research was carried out, with conten...

Urban agriculture provides a range of ecosystem services (as well as potential disservices). This study examines the spatial extent, physical characteristics, and residents' perceptions of community a...

Urban green space is conducive to the physical and mental health of residents. However, exposure to green space is often highly unequal. This research addresses a major gap in the green space literatu...

Food systems literature has shifted towards interdisciplinarity and the use of systems lenses but can still be disjointed and unconnected. To bring together disciplinary knowledge and establish a comm...