"BE:MUSES / Modeling Materials Flows for Sustainable Industrial Systems in Urban Centers" is an interdisciplinary "proof of concept" effort that links and integrates separate models from engineering and planning to test the overall hypothesis that regional location matters for industrial ecology. The researchers seek to address the significant gap in thinking on sustainability that has resulted from treating sustainable industrial systems separately from sustainable urban systems. Efforts to mitigate the environmental impacts of industry cannot be fully realized until this gap is closed.
The research will evaluate the potential to create hybrid models from materials flow and urban systems models for examining the impact of regional location on industrial ecology. In so doing, it will build an intellectual partnership between researchers in the fields of chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, and city and regional planning. The model development will be built on a case of computer recycling and remanufacturing for the Atlanta metropolitan region. Engineering has been working towards sustainable industrial systems, and city and regional planning has been working towards sustainable urban systems. This planning grant will directly impact society by demonstrating that engineering and regional planning not only can work together to marry the goals of sustainable industrial and urban systems, but must do so to realize greater achievement of the conditions of sustainability than either discipline could achieve independently. Accurate modeling of materials flows for urban centers will contribute to the ability to develop market-based collection, recycling, and remanufacturing systems and to ensure that the impacts stemming from the consumption of greenfields are compared to those generated in urban areas in need of economic revitalization.
