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Establishing a sustainable future for all is a daunting world challenge that requires new modes of working together, both within and between organizations: business, foundations, government, industry, NGOs, universities and other stakeholders. I will discuss the approach being taken at Cornell to address challenges in the highly interconnected and interdependent themes of Energy, Environment and Economic Development. These three E&’s form a system that must be addressed as a whole to optimize the chances of implementing workable solutions and minimize unintended consequences. Cornell&’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future (ACSF) focuses on building research teams, especially those that nucleate new or unique collaborations to tackle problems that are invariably multidisciplinary in nature. Many of these teams produce initial data, develop proof of principle or demonstrate real team cohesiveness so that initial seed funding leads to external collaborations and leveraged resources. Other teams develop white papers that stimulate broader consideration of issues and potential solutions and that may also be used as input to policy makers. ACSF programs are designed to convene, connect, incubate (seed) and innovate to develop workable solutions to improve both human well-being and the environment. Over three hundred faculty fellows are engaged in ACSF programs; they come from 65 departments and all 11 colleges on the Ithaca campus. Alums and other interested parties are engaged in suggesting specific opportunities, connecting teams to appropriate external organizations, and in investing resources in programs. Underlying these problem-focused programs is a strong internal and external communications effort to inform and inspire. ACSF helps to develop communications processes conducive to effective multidisciplinary research, to build programs congenial to such collaborations, and to develop trust and the common language needed to work together. Examples of processes, programs, and successful projects will be used to illustrate the above.

For more than 85 years, Caterpillar Inc. has been making sustainable progress possible and driving positive change on every continent. Caterpillar provides products, services, and solutions that help the world's people meet basic requirements such as shelter, clean water, sanitation, and reliable energy in ways that sustain the environment. Enabling economic growth through infrastructure and energy development utilizing solutions that protect people and preserve the planet is Caterpillar's primary mission. Sustainability strategies are being incorporated throughout the Caterpillar enterprise, including tactics for both short and long term growth, as well as strategies for innovation and technology development. This presentation will describe the change management methods currently being utilized to incorporate sustainability into the Caterpillar culture, value chain, and business performance metrics. The life cycle sustainability impacts of Caterpillar products will be reviewed, including the relative contributions of Caterpillar's suppliers, manufacturing operations, and customers. New and pending product innovations that help customers improve their sustainability performance will be described. Finally, the development and implementation of core sustainability principles that apply to all employee levels and disciplines as well as all geographic regions served by the Caterpillar enterprise will be presented and discussed.

Sustainability has become an area of emphasis for the National Science Foundation, NSF, as evidenced by the many programs within the portfolio of the Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) initiative. A new effort under the SEES initiative, and one outlined in the FY13 Budget Request, is the Sustainable Chemistry, Engineering, and Materials (SusChEM) initiative. The Sustainable Materials effort seeks to support and encourage research projects targeting the discovery of new materials or make materials more sustainable through improved synthesis, enhanced applications, and/or advances in lifecycle management. These efforts as well as those in other participating divisions will be described.

Environmental issues are steadily getting more and more attention at EU policy level. This can for example be seen in the Raw Materials Initiative by DG Enterprise and Resource Efficient Europe by DG Environment which goes back to the theme of a sustainable economy as expressed by the Europe 2020 growth strategy. DG Research and Innovation supports related research activities. The Nanotechnology, Materials & Production (NMP) Theme in the FP7 Cooperation scheme has taken stock of this, by for example by including aspects such as substitution, life cycle assessment, improved resource efficiency and better performance materials in the NMP calls for proposals. This is done with the aim to achieve a more green economy and fostering more sustainable consumption and production patterns. Research on better performing and sustainable materials will more than ever be a pre-condition to meeting such challenges. Progress will come through the development of intelligent materials that embed and transfer knowledge into products and processes or perform certain tasks, when in use or during manufacturing. Already, some 70 percent of all technical innovations hinge directly or indirectly on the properties of the materials employed. We have passed from the perception "materials are in the drawer" to the perception "materials are the bottleneck". The next step can be "materials are the solution". At least 60 % of the total proposed Horizon 2020 budget will be related to sustainable development, the vast majority of this expenditure contributing to mutually reinforcing climate and environmental objectives. In a resource-scarce Europe, new products must have low material / energy resource needs and high knowledge content. As stated in the Europe 2020 strategy endorsed by EU leaders: “Europe must promote technologies and production methods that reduce natural resource use, and increase investment in the EU's existing natural assets”. Materials can have a large environmental impact in many of its stages, from sourcing, extraction, processing, auxiliary materials and processes, use and end of life fate. The choice or design of material solutions can thus have a great impact on the technologies in which they are used. Implying that a material could be an integral part of the solution to a problem created by the use of a specific technology. Such solutions could require entirely new materials either to replace a material or be part of a new technology based on better performing materials and ecodesigned products.

One third of the world's carbon emissions are emitted by industry. Most industrial emissions relate to producing materials, and steel and cement are by far the most important contributors. The industries that make materials are energy-intensive, so have always been motivated to be efficient, and have now reached a fantastic level of performance. However the world's demand for materials is growing, and likely to double by 2050. So, by default, industrial emissions will also double, unless we do something differently. This talk sets out an agenda for making a big difference to global emissions, by requiring less new material. Based on a five-year project, with eight researchers and a consortium of 20 large industrial partners, we have gathered evidence on six “material efficiency” options which allow us to provide the same final services (such as housing or transport) with significantly less material. The talk will present a series of case studies to demonstrate how these strategies can be applied in practice, and explore the actions by government, businesses, and consumers that would bring them about.

Sustainability is a hot topic nowadays, and seems to be quite the popular issue; and it is about time! Rachel Carson&’s seminal book “Silent Spring” was published in 1962 and ten years later, in 1972, DDT was banned. Sustainable development is and must be part of the engineering curriculum. Societal issues facing the 21^st century spanning from energy, food and water, transportation, housing, materials, and health require engineering solutions that are sustainable. But how does one teach this? Where does it fit in our packed curricula? How does one teach the basic concepts that natural systems are closed loop, use few elements, are cyclic, and where the indicator of well-being is equilibrium? At WPI, we have decided to start this journey early on, and in fact the first day the student sets foot on campus. In this presentation, the Great Problem Seminars (GPS) course will be described and discussed, and in particular, the course titled: “Sustainable Development for the 21^st Century”, a course developed by D. Apelian and S. Nikitina (from Humanities and Arts). The course is different than any structured engineering course. It is interdisciplinary, it is writing intensive, and requires a Socratic approach to “learning” (not teaching) and an immersion in an eight week long project in teams of five students. In brief, the course implants in the students&’ mind from day one that we can make a difference in the world through engineering, and through elegant solutions that are sustainable.

Thin films prepared via layer-by-layer (LbL) assembly of renewable materials exhibit exceptional oxygen barrier and flame retardant properties. Positively- charged chitosan (CH), at two different pH levels (3 and 6), was paired with anionic montmorillonite (MMT) clay nanoplatelets. Thin film assemblies prepared with CH at high pH are thicker due to low polymer charge density. A 30 bilayer (CH pH 6-MMT) nanocoating (~100 nm thick) reduces the oxygen permeability of a 0.5 mm thick polylactic acid film by four orders of magnitude. This same coating system completely stops the melting of a flexible polyurethane foam, when exposed to direct flame from a butane torch, with just 10 bilayers (~ 30 nm thick). Cone calorimetry confirms that this coated foam exhibited a reduced peak heat release rate, by as much as 52%, relative to the uncoated control. These sustainable nanocoatings could prove beneficial for new types of food packaging or a replacement for environmentally persistent antiflammable compounds.

These days, the environmental regulations on industrial consumption have been tightened up, leading to an urgent need for the development of new eco-friendly materials. Thus, natural products, non-toxic and environmental-friendly products, have gained much attention in regard to the development of “green chemicals”. During the last five years, we have undertaken research on the preparation and modification of bio-based monomers. In course of our project, a number of “dimer acids” have been prepared by recycling of waste cooking oil, e.g. waste vegetable and animal oils. In general, vegetable oil contains unsaturated fatty acids such as oleic acid and linoleic acid, and, thus, various dimer acids, e.g. monocyclic, bicyclic, acyclic dimer acids can be prepared via the synthesis process using fatty acids as raw materials. In the present work, we investigated the effects of the presence of dimer acid (DA) molecules in the Na-sulfonated polystyrene (PSSNa) and poly(styrene-co Na-methacrylate) (PSMANa) ionomers on the ionomer properties dynamic mechanically. We found that the presence of DA molecules in the PSSNa ionomer decreased the matrix and cluster Tgs of the ionomer strongly without changing the ionic modulus of the ionomer. Thus, we proposed that the DA molecules resided in the matrix and cluster regions of the PSSNa ionomer and acted mainly as effective plasticizer. In the case of the PSMANa ionomers, the presence of the DA molecules decreased the cluster Tg of the ionomer, without chaining the matrix Tg, and increased the ionic modulus of the ionomer. Thus, we suggested that the monocyclic and bicyclic DA molecules in the PSMANa ionomer also acted as plasticizer, but the acyclic DA molecules were phase-separated to form filler particles that increased the ionic modulus of the PSMANa ionomer. We also observed that the positions of X-ray peak of PSSNa ionomers containing DA did not change with DA amounts, but those of PSMANa ionomers shifted to higher angles. This X-ray result was also supportive for the proposed roles of Na molecules in PSSNa and PSMANa ionomers. In conclusion, we found that the NA can be used as very effective “green” plasticizer [This study was supported by the R&D Center for Valuable Recycling (Global-Top Environmental Technology Development Program) funded by the Ministry of Environment, Korea (Project No.:11-D27-OD)].

Polyurethane (PU) is one of the most frequently used for various applications such as insulation, automotive parts and seating materials. However, these materials were strongly depended on petroleum as feedstock and this fact became problematic because of steadily going up of petroleum oil price and environmental aspect as well as sustainability. Therefore the development of bio-renewable feedstocks for PU such as plant oil-based materials became highly desirable in industrial field. In this research, the bio-based PU was synthesized by reaction between isocyanate and castor oil. The castor oil was used as polyol among various plant oils because it was excellent polyol candidate because of its low toxicity, availability, and low cost. In addition, the castor oil could be used for polyol directly to react with isocyanate groups without chemical modification because it had already hydroxyl groups. The nanocellulose of eco friendly nanofillers was prepared in order to reinforce the castor oil-based polyurethane. Nano size cellulose fiber and whisker have a great interest as new excellent reinforcements because it was biodegradable and had remarkable mechanical properties and lightness than those of natural fiber or glass fiber. The nanocellulose whiskers were prepared by chemical and mechanical treatments. The castor oil-based PU (CPU) was reinforced by nanocellulose with two different methods, which the CPU was physically bonded with nanocellulose (CPU/nanocellulose) by solution casting and chemically bonded with nanocellulose (CPU-nanocellulose) to improve interfacial adhesion. The covalent bonding formation between hydroxyl group of nanocellulose and isocyanate was confirmed by FTIR. The nanocellulose covalently bonded with CPU increased storage modulus and complex viscosity of CPU as measured by rheological analysis. This was due to improvement of cross-link density of the elastomer network because of nanocellulose-PU molecular interaction. The mechanical properties of CPU reinforced by nanocellulose composites were investigated. Tensile test revealed that CPU-nanocellulose composites had highest tensile strength and modulus because of improvement of interfacial adhesion and nanoreinforcing effect of nanocellulose with high aspect ratio. The effect of nanocellulose on thermal stability of CPU was also investigated. This research was supported by National Research Foundation of Korea. (Project No. 2011-0028966)

Although the environmental benefits of recycling plastics are well established and most geographic locations within the U.S. offer some plastic recycling, recycling rates are often low. Low recycling rates are often observed in conventional centralized recycling plants due to the challenge of collection and transportation for high-volume low-weight polymers. The recycling rates decline further when low population density, rural and relatively isolated communities are investigated because of the distance to recycling centers makes recycling difficult and both economically and energetically inefficient. The recent development of a class of ope