Read the full story from Feed Navigator.
The North American Renderers Association (NARA) urges the EPA, USDA, and FDA to recognize the pivotal role played by the US rendering industry in curbing food loss, waste, and minimizing the overall ecological footprint of food production.
Read the full story from Drawdown Georgia.
Energy-efficient retrofits are an important climate solution for Georgia. Why?
Buildings use electricity and natural gas for heating, cooling, ventilating, water heating, lighting, and to power appliances and electronic devices. Up to 30% of greenhouse gasses globally come from these sources. Retrofitting existing buildings to make them more efficient has tremendous potential to accelerate our progress on climate.
As with all Drawdown Georgia climate solutions, home energy efficiency upgrades have benefits that go Beyond Carbon. They reduce energy bills, reduce pollution, and benefit the natural environment.
Rosenboom, J.-G., Langer, R., & Traverso, G. (2022). “Bioplastics for a circular economy.” Nature Reviews Materials, 7(2), 117–137. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-021-00407-8 [open access]
Bioplastics — typically plastics manufactured from bio-based polymers — stand to contribute to more sustainable commercial plastic life cycles as part of a circular economy, in which virgin polymers are made from renewable or recycled raw materials. Carbon-neutral energy is used for production and products are reused or recycled at their end of life (EOL). In this Review, we assess the advantages and challenges of bioplastics in transitioning towards a circular economy. Compared with fossil-based plastics, bio-based plastics can have a lower carbon footprint and exhibit advantageous materials properties; moreover, they can be compatible with existing recycling streams and some offer biodegradation as an EOL scenario if performed in controlled or predictable environments. However, these benefits can have trade-offs, including negative agricultural impacts, competition with food production, unclear EOL management and higher costs. Emerging chemical and biological methods can enable the ‘upcycling’ of increasing volumes of heterogeneous plastic and bioplastic waste into higher-quality materials. To guide converters and consumers in their purchasing choices, existing (bio)plastic identification standards and life cycle assessment guidelines need revision and homogenization. Furthermore, clear regulation and financial incentives remain essential to scale from niche polymers to large-scale bioplastic market applications with truly sustainable impact.
Nasr, N. (Ed.). (2024). Technology Innovation for the Circular Economy: Recycling, Remanufacturing, Design, Systems Analysis and Logistics (1st ed.). Wiley. Buy it on Bookshop (affiliate link)
Some of the greatest opportunities for innovation in the circular economy are in remanufacturing, refurbishment, reuse, and recycling. Critical to its growth, however, are developments in product design approaches and the manufacturing business model that are often met with challenges in the current, largely linear economies of today’s global manufacturing chains.
The conference hosted by the REMADE Institute in Rochester, NY, brought together U.S. and international researchers, industry engineers, technologists, and policymakers, to discuss the myriad intertwining issues relating to the circular economy.
This book consists of 56 chapters in 10 distinct parts covering broad areas of research and applications in the circular economy area. The first four parts explore the system level work related to circular economy approaches, models and advancements including the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to guide implementation, as well as design for circularity approaches. Mechanical and chemical recycling technologies follow, highlighting some of the most advanced research in those areas. Next, innovation in remanufacturing is addressed with descriptions of some of the most advanced work in this field. This is followed by tire remanufacturing and recycling, highlighting innovative technologies in addressing the volume of end-of-use tires. Pathways to net-zero emissions in manufacturing of materials concludes the book, with a focus on industrial decarbonization.
Audience
This book has a wide audience in academic institutes, business professionals and engineers in a variety of manufacturing industries. It will also appeal to economists and policymakers working on the circular economy, clean tech investors, industrial decision-makers, and environmental professionals.
Hofmann, V., Kalluri, P. R., Jurafsky, D., & King, S. (2024). Dialect prejudice predicts AI decisions about people’s character, employability, and criminality (arXiv:2403.00742). arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2403.00742
Hundreds of millions of people now interact with language models, with uses ranging from serving as a writing aid to informing hiring decisions. Yet these language models are known to perpetuate systematic racial prejudices, making their judgments biased in problematic ways about groups like African Americans. While prior research has focused on overt racism in language models, social scientists have argued that racism with a more subtle character has developed over time. It is unknown whether this covert racism manifests in language models. Here, we demonstrate that language models embody covert racism in the form of dialect prejudice: we extend research showing that Americans hold raciolinguistic stereotypes about speakers of African American English and find that language models have the same prejudice, exhibiting covert stereotypes that are more negative than any human stereotypes about African Americans ever experimentally recorded, although closest to the ones from before the civil rights movement. By contrast, the language models’ overt stereotypes about African Americans are much more positive. We demonstrate that dialect prejudice has the potential for harmful consequences by asking language models to make hypothetical decisions about people, based only on how they speak. Language models are more likely to suggest that speakers of African American English be assigned less prestigious jobs, be convicted of crimes, and be sentenced to death. Finally, we show that existing methods for alleviating racial bias in language models such as human feedback training do not mitigate the dialect prejudice, but can exacerbate the discrepancy between covert and overt stereotypes, by teaching language models to superficially conceal the racism that they maintain on a deeper level. Our findings have far-reaching implications for the fair and safe employment of language technology.
Read the full story from the Associated Press.
A company that recycles solar panels announced Thursday that it would build a $344 million factory in northwest Georgia, for the first time expanding to making new glass for panels.
Read the full story at Innovation News Network.
Davide Sabbadin, Acting Policy Manager for Climate and Energy, and Alberto Vela, Senior Communications Officer for Climate and Energy at the EEB, a partner organisation of the EUSEW, discuss the vital role of energy efficiency for decarbonisation targets.
Read the full story from The Manufacturer.
As the food and beverage (F&B) industry grows, so too does its energy demands. And with all eyes now firmly fixed on ESG, F&B manufacturers need to take proactive steps to minimise their impact on the planet. Fortunately, there are a number of areas where F&B manufacturers can focus to save money, reduce their carbon emissions and be seen as businesses that take their ESG obligations seriously.
Grunwell, J. R., Mutic, A. D., Ezhuthachan, I. D., Mason, C., Tidwell, M., Caldwell, C., Norwood, J., Zack, S., Jordan, N., & Fitzpatrick, A. M. (2024). “Environmental injustice is associated with poorer asthma outcomes in school-age children with asthma in metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia.” The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice, S2213219824001715. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaip.2024.02.015
Environmental justice mandates that no person suffers disproportionately from environmental exposures. The Environmental Justice Index (EJI) provides an estimate of the environmental burden for each census tract but has not yet been utilized in asthma populations.
We hypothesized that children from census tracts with high environmental injustice determined by the EJI would have a greater burden of asthma exacerbations, poorer asthma control, and poorer lung function over 12 months.
Children 6-18 years with asthma (N=575) from metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia, completed a baseline research visit. Participant addresses were geocoded to obtain the EJI Social-Environmental ranking for each participant’s census tract, which was divided into tertiles. Medical records were reviewed for 12 months for asthma exacerbations. A subset of participants completed a second research visit involving spirometry and questionnaires.
Census tracts with the greatest environmental injustice had more racial/ethnic minorities, lower socioeconomic status, more hazardous exposures (particularly to airborne pollutants), and greater proximity to railroads and heavily trafficked roadways. Children with asthma residing in high injustice census tracts had a longer duration of asthma, greater historical asthma-related healthcare utilization, poorer asthma symptom control and quality of life, and more impaired lung function. By 12 months, children from high injustice census tracts also had more asthma exacerbations with a shorter time to exacerbation and persistently more symptoms, poorer asthma control, and reduced lung function.
Disparities in environmental justice are present in metropolitan Atlanta that may contribute to asthma outcomes in children. These findings require additional study and action to improve health equity.
Hammad, O., Rahman, M. R., Clements, N., Mishra, S., Miller, S., & Sullivan, E. (2024). PureNav: A Personalized Navigation Service for Environmental Justice Communities Impacted by Planned Disruptions (arXiv:2402.11180). arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11180
Planned disruptions such as highway constructions are commonplace nowadays and the communities living near these disruptions generally tend to be environmental justice communities — low socioeconomic status with disproportionately high and adverse human health and environmental effects. A major concern is that such activities negatively impact people’s well-being by disrupting their daily commutes via frequent road closures and increased dust and air pollution. This paper addresses this concern by developing a personalized navigation service called PureNav to mitigate the negative impacts of disruptions in daily commutes on people’s well-being. PureNav has been designed using active engagement with four environmental justice communities affected by major highway construction. It has been deployed in the real world among the members of the four communities, and a detailed analysis of the data collected from this deployment as well as surveys show that PureNav is potentially useful in improving people’s well-being. The paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of PureNav, and offers suggestions for further improving its efficacy.
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