Funded Projects

Team Members

Pablo Daniel Taddei Arriola, Iuliana Bleanda-Mogosanu, David Carruthers, Desmond Cole

Affiliated Organizations

Sustainability without Borders (SWB), University of Sonora

Advisor

Jose Alfaro

Project Summary

With seed grant funds, the project team traveled to Tastiota, Mexico, during summer 2016 to look at the feasibility of implementing a small-scale Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) desalination plant to provide communities with potable water. The team also developed and tested a prototype at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The CSP desalination plant technology explored in this project is based on the Central Tower Technology, which is being developed by the University of Sonora. The northwestern region of Mexico in the state of Sonora, Hermosillo County is an ideal location to implement the small-scale CSP desalination plant. Hermosillo County lacks of fresh water availability, but has abundant solar radiation. Implementation of a CSP desalination plant here will alleviate water scarcity pressures in the region and serve as a renewable alternative to current water delivery methods.

After completing the educational prototype, achieving local political and community support, and finalizing a favorable economic analysis, the team is now seeking to build a CSP desalination plant in the community of Tastiota.

Team Members

Jared Aslakson, Emily Canosa, Jacob Grochowski, Isabella Herold, Lauren Hoff, Hayley Kerner, Christine Rickard, Kate Samra, Alexandra Weber

Advisor

Raymond De Young

Project Summary

The project team facilitated an environmental education workshop series to increase the flow of information about sustainable food systems between Washtenaw County community groups and faculty, staff and students at the University of Michigan (U-M). The U-M community has considerable experience about local food systems and is interested in a wider distribution of knowledge about this issue.

The series of workshops focused on action strategies to support long-term behavior change, as well as increasing knowledge of local food systems, and actionable steps towards increasing the sustainability of these systems. U-M Sustainable Food Program faculty, students and staff facilitated the development of workshops, and conduced participant surveys. The project team expects that by strengthening the local food systems, more positive economic, environmental, and equity changes will occur at U-M and throughout Washtenaw County.

Team Members

Christina Reynolds, Michael Lipowicz, Anna Harrison, Brad Smith

Advisor

Christian Lastoskie

Project Summary

The Carbon Connection Program is a carbon education program designated to enhance public understanding of how daily activities influence carbon emissions. The average person has little exposure to sustainable living practices in their daily lives. To address this issue, this team developed a targeted carbon dioxide (CO2) education program in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Two interactive educational boards were prototyped at the Ann Arbor Hands On-Museum.

The program focused on teaching people about their personal role in climate change and carbon emissions by collocating emissions data directly beside the services and infrastructures (e.g., buildings, transportation, food) with which people live and work. The visualization of carbon emissions from food production, electricity/gas usage, and transportation allowed individuals to better understand how changes in habits can reduce their carbon footprint. Specific targets for project were reducing building, transportation, and food emissions while increasing climate change understanding. Participants were encouraged to reach a goal of reducing personal carbon emissions by 2%. The project team anticipates that this project and the Carbon Connection Program will have a direct impact on the culture of sustainability by through innovative teaching methods.

Team Members

Sneha Rao, Michelle Hindman, Olivia Lu-Hill, Sean Murphy, Yash Shah, Zeqi Zhu

Adviser

Vikramaditya Khanna

Project Summary

Indian megacities face several unique challenges in providing even basic needs and services, notably housing, water, and waste management, for one of the largest and most dense populations in the world. Government campaigns launched in the past year, “Swachh Bharat Abhiyan” (Clean India Mission) and “Housing For All by 2022” represent a nationwide call to action for a cleaner, healthier, and safer India.

Achieving these ambitions are complicated in an urban environment where core problems are magnified in scale and particularly daunting in Mumbai, where half of the city’s population is estimated to live in slums. Future slum redevelopment projects present an opportunity to learn from past policies, especially now as cities prepare citywide plans for executing the clarion call of “housing for all”.

Our aim for this project is to create a resource of knowledge for policy makers, developers, and architects involved in upgrading low-income informal housing and to develop a streamlined process that would benefit all involved parties, including slum dwellers and government agencies. Our research analyses of the Mumbai Model for slum redevelopment and of the existing implementation tools and practices, have given us insight into how the current approach can be improved upon.

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Jose Alfaro (Assistant Professor, School of Natural Resources)

Faculty Co-advisor

Dr. Steven Wright (Professor, School of Engineering)

Team Members

Whitney Johnson (MS, School of Natural Resources, team point of contact); Sibu Kuruvilla (Ph.D., School of Engineering, 2nd point of contact); Rashmi Krishnan (MS, School of Natural Resources); Zu Dienle Tan (MS, School of Natural Resources); Nicholas Jansen (BA, College of Literature, Science and the Arts, Program in the Environment)

Partner organizations

Sustainability Without Borders, Rural Intercultural Student Exchange (RISE, Beijing)

Project Summary

High levels of arsenic in the groundwater in China are a major public health concern. In addition to a fairly widespread volume of naturally occurring arsenic-contaminated well-water across China, a significant amount of arsenic is contributed by anthropogenic actions like rapid industrialization, weak environmental policies and poor planning. Cases of chronic arsenicosis have been found in eight provinces in mainland China, including Shanxi. Biosand Filters (BSF) are low-cost, low maintenance, point-of-use filters that are built out of locally available materials. The Arsenic Biosand Filter (ABSF) is a version of the BSF that is designed to remove arsenic and pathogens present in the groundwater. At the University of Michigan, we built a prototype of an ABSF design with the intent of replicating the contamination and filtration scenario in Shanxi, testing our filter and further optimizing our design. At Pingyao - Shanxi, we worked with our student partner organization, the Rural Inter-cultural Student Exchange (RISE) group from Tsinghua University and a student group from the Taiyuan University of Technology to implement another design variant of the ABSF in a village. We successfully built 43 ABSFs in individual households, and initial performance tests showed that the ABSFs were able to remove up to 87% of arsenic, relative to the arsenic content of the inflowing water, while minimizing the turbidity of the water. Ongoing and future work entails the periodic testing of the filters’ performance to ensure arsenic removal is stable and continuously available. Further, we are interested in creating a dynamic flow setup to reduce labor intensity of using the ABSF and further automate the system. Additionally, we are currently researching the extent of arsenic contamination in other communities to explore regions we can expand our work to.

Team Members

Spencer Harbo, Adam Nault

Partner

Victoria Bellotti

Adviser

Raymond De Young

Project Summary

Overconsumption of the Earth’s natural resources is causing widespread environmental degradation and anthropogenic climate change. Future environmental sustainability may be fundamentally dependent on our ability to reduce current levels of consumption. One way to implement this much-needed societal change is by motivating individual and community participation in place-based resource sharing.

The success of place-based resource sharing may be dependent on our understanding of the needs of communities, including what motivates individuals to share resources, as well as the barriers to engaging in sharing. Currently, our team is coordinating a project through the Dow Master’s Fellowship to answer these questions within the context of Southeastern Michigan. Through interviews with leaders of sharing organizations and a survey of community members in four comparison communities, this ongoing project aims to capture motivations for sharing in order to help improve local sharing economies through a well-informed social marketing and urban design strategy.

The proposed project will build off of our ongoing work in two distinct ways: 1) in collaboration with the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), we will develop a cross-sectional qualitative assessment to better understand motivations for participating in local sharing economies among communities in the United States and abroad; and 2) we will provide consultation and support to computer-human interaction designers at PARC, Penn State University, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and leaders in the hOurworld timebanking network to improve the predictive functionality of a ‘smart’ mobile TimeBanking application currently under development, which will draw on our motivational interview findings to match community members with one another and encourage the sharing of resources and services.

Project Leaders

Erin Moser and Kelsey Thome

Faculty Advisor

Peter Bodary

Project Summary

With a lack of preventative health knowledge, inaccessibility to means of a healthy lifestyle, and often limited role models for healthy living, children often lack a positive, permanent influence on their health, especially in such a critical time for habitual learning and growth. The goal of the Health Enrichment Program for Kids (HEPK) is to offer a holistic and interactive after school program that encourages a sustainable and healthy lifestyle for children at a young and malleable age. Our target group is kindergarten and first grade students, particularly of a minority and socioeconomically disadvantaged background.

Our goal is to improve the quantity and quality of nutritional education children receive, as well as to increase the amount of physical education instruction they attain in their developmental years. Healthy behaviors we hope to instill include finding fun ways to remain active throughout one’s lifetime (such as walking, dancing, and yoga), choosing healthier food options, and living a sustainable lifestyle (such as planting one’s own garden, buying more local produce, and buying fewer processed snacks).

HEPK works alongside The Peace Neighborhood Center, a local nonprofit whose mission is to provide programs for children, families, and individuals who are affected by social and economic disparities, and to help people discover options, enhance skills, and make choices that lead to self-sufficiency and positive community involvement. HEPK utilizes the organization’s facilities, general ideologies, and program goals when instructing and interacting with the kids. HEPK runs on a weekly basis, facilitating activities for kindergarten and first graders once a week at Peace Neighborhood. Each month focuses on one of four topics:

• A Lifestyle in Motion (Exercise)
• Healthy Relationships
• Diet & Nutrition
• Environmental Education

Team members

Patricia Koman, Frank Romo, Susan Landfried, Meredith Burke, Kyu Lee

Partners

Chris Coombe, Nancy French, Beth Gibbons, Kimberly Knott Hill, Donele Wilkins

Adviser

Marie O'Neill , Carina Gronlund, Robert Goodspeed

Project Summary

Northern states such as Michigan have a need to characterize climate change related exposures and vulnerabilities, especially regarding heat stress. Academic and community partners can provide the necessary methods development, data, and impetus for a state to enhance its exposure assessment and thereby facilitate healthier, sustainable communities.

We completed a first heat stress Geographic Information System (GIS) layer of a larger We assembled readily available underlying data and created heat stress vulnerability indices and maps, including for the first time temperature projections from climate modeling ensembles, that will allow the public to understand the location and relative magnitude climate vulnerability on selected metrics across the state of Michigan. This phase focused on vulnerabilities to heat stress at the census tract level as one example of a climate change-related human health impact.

Team Members

Fangzhou Zhang, Yue Wang, Tong Guo

Adviser

Prof. Paul Edwards

Project Summary

One of the most widespread policies to foster environmental sustainability is the government’s supports for the purchases of hybrid vehicles. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 provides tax credits amounting to $3000 at most for consumers who purchase energy efficient vehicles. The tax credit provided for purchasers of hybrid vehicles is considered as a powerful tool to promote the hybrid vehicles, which typically achieve more efficient fuel economy and lower emissions.

Despite a booming market for autos as a result of economic recovery, the sales for hybrid vehicles are decreasing due to recent drop in gas prices. The question that we aim to answer is to what extent is the potential consumers’ decisions to purchase hybrid vehicles are determined by the tax credits and fluctuating gas prices. This will not only help us understand the rationale behind the individual choices, but will also guide the policy toward environmental sustainability.