Systems Engineering for Environmental Applications
Citation:
Smith, Raymond L. Systems Engineering for Environmental Applications. Invited Seminar at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, March 29, 2024.
Impact/Purpose:
This abstract describes a presentation to the Systems Engineering program professors and students at Cornell University in March of 2024. The presentation is on research that supports Sustainable Materials Management in EPA’s Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery. The efforts described in the presentation include predicting release profiles, describing the potential impacts of climate change on the storage of fuels, and plastic packaging recycling. Packaging is a postconsumer use stream where some plastics are recycled. This effort describes flows of plastics that are collected, sorted, reclaimed, further processed, and converted for downstream uses. An example case study is described for polyethylene terephthalate (PET, plastic #1). Information about the resource use and releases to the environment for all of the case studies presented supports efforts in Sustainable Materials Management, where individual generation, recycling, composting, combustion with energy recovery, and landfilling flows are tracked within the non-hazardous waste management hierarchy.
Description:
Systems engineering can encapsulate many areas of design and production. A prudent course is to consider the environmental effects in design, construction, operation, product manufacturing and use, and end of life. To consider these effects requires information about the resources used and the environmental releases. Resource use provides information on the supply chains of materials needed for the system. The emissions, water discharges, and solid waste from various processes are needed to determine environmental impacts, with a complete analysis including many potential impacts. Thus, an imperative step of sustainability analysis in system engineering is to determine the resource use and environmental releases. This presentation will describe methods for estimating these values for example systems including cellulosic ethanol production, storage of chemicals and fuels, and recycling of plastics. For a holistic analysis, attention to details of processes provides necessary information on the path to an optimized system. The views expressed in this presentation are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views or policies of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.