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Industry Comparison Tools for Sustainable Communities
Citation:
Ingwersen, W., L. Heyns, AND V. Thomas. Industry Comparison Tools for Sustainable Communities. Presented at Georgia Tech Smarter Together Webinar Series, NA, October 15, 2020.
Impact/Purpose:
To provide an overview of the Community Apps with USEEIO RESES project and particularly accomplishments from our Georgia Tech partnership in the Summer of 2020 work on the USEEIO widgets to a diverse audience of individuals and organizations from communities, non-profits, businesses primarily in Georgia, and also to announce and advertise our Challenge event that we plan to host in early 2021 to contine work on the widgets.
Description:
When we are looking at industries from the lens of sustainable materials management, we see them as a network of actors that are working convert materials into products and provide services around those materials (see EPA 2009 Figure 2: The Flow of Materials). Another name for this network is our economy. Looking at how each of these industries are not only interconnected with each other, but also interconnected with the environment as they take in energy or materials and convert them into a product and generate waste. This is also called the life cycle perspective.EPA has developed a model and an interface called the Sustainable Materials Management Prioritization Tools that provides an analytical view of our economy from this lens (see EPA SMM Tools). The engine underneath it is combined economic-environmental model called USEEIO which is a model of all the industries in our economy in about 400 categories (see USEEIO webpage). Many are finding this model useful But there are a couple challenges. Challenge 1. Industries are doing this work and providing these jobs in our communities (see small town image). Many stakeholders from community representatives to industry leaders are making strategic decisions that shape which industries are operating in a given communities. We would like these stakeholders to be able to have this sustainable materials management and life perspective backed by solid quantitive information..but this leads to next two challenges. Challenge 2. The model is a national model with national averages. Can we make this more relative to a local area? We're meeting this challenge in a couple ways 2.1. We're developing state-specific versions of the model. We had been working in the last few years on a model for Georgia with GA partners including GA Department of Economic Development and continue now to work on improving our GA model and building models for other state partners (see 2018 EPA Research in Support of States SMM Webinar). 2.2 What we're also doing though is pairing the model information with other information on local industries, demographics...Loren Heyns will reveal some of this in his part of the presentation. Challenge 3. The model is highly technical in nature and not conducive in its native form for widespread use (see USEEIO matrices on data.gov). Web-based tools are great and we're put the model up on an API which is a common way that data is shared now to drive content on the web. So our approach has been to create some 'drop-in' components or widgets that a web developer could take and put into a website that visualize results from the model and cut out the steep learning curve from the path to use of the model (see widgets examples) But we couldn't meet these challenges alone. Through a Regional Sustainability and Environmental Sciences Research Program (RESES) grant we partnered with Georgia Department of Economic Development and were were able to bring on three interns through the Georgia Tech Smart Community Corp as well as GA Tech faculty member Dr. Valerie Thomas in the summer of 2020 to develop these widgets and work to start incorporating these widgets along with other data on localities (see RESES team) We will demonstrate what we were able to accomplish this summer and also are excited to share an open opportunity to continue this work in the form of a Challenge event to be held in 2021. Links for demo https://www.epa.gov/smm https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-09/documents/vision2.pdf https://www.epa.gov/smm/smm-prioritization-tools-index https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/useeio-v1-1-matrices https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Main_Street_-_Downtown_Crosby%2C_Minnesota_%2835919417295%29.jpg https://www.epa.gov/research-states/sustainable-materials-management-smm-webinar-archive https://useeiowidgets.imfast.io/
