Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Living Breakwaters Pdr Efforts Econcrete Resource Analysis, Guianina Ferrari, Shervon Stephens, Calvin O. Walters Jr.

Publications and Research

On October 29, 2012, Superstorm Sandy impacted 443,000 people and caused nearly $19 billion (about $58 per person in the US) worth of damage within New York City. As part of the New York City infrastructure reparation plan, the Living Breakwaters project in Tottenville addressed coastal resilience, allocating $100M of public funds to a series of artificial breakwaters by the southwest coast of Staten Island. Each breakwater is constructed and designed to mitigate water flow in storm events. ECOncrete, a primary element of the breakwater, is a specialty cast cementitious product that is marine organism-friendly that encourages biocalcification and photosynthesis. …

The Living Breakwaters Pdr Efforts: Conceptual Scheduling, Calvin O. Walters Jr.

Publications and Research

On October 29, 2012, Superstorm Sandy caused nearly $19 billion in damages in New York City including 69,000 residential units across the five boroughs. This disaster precipitated a post-disaster-rebuilding (PDR) project including roughly $4.2 billion in a Community Development Block Grant allocated towards PDR projects. A portion of the grant was used to construct a living breakwater in Tottenville, Staten Island, consisting of a resiliency approach to risk reduction through erosion prevention, wave energy attenuation, and enhancement of ecosystems and social resiliency to improve resistance to storms for the community of Tottenville. The ridges of each breakwater are designed with …

Unbuilding: How Deconstruction Is Saving The Planet By Giving Building Materials A Second Life, Diana M. Ducroz

Capstones

In 2018, more than 600 million tons of construction and demolition (C&D) waste was generated in the United States, more than twice the volume of ordinary trash created by American households and businesses. Even though 80-95% of this concrete, asphalt, steel, wood, drywall, glass and brick can be reused, repurposed or recycled, a quarter of it – or 145 million tons in 2018 – ends up in landfills. Thirty million tons of wood alone – often sturdy, irreplaceable old-growth lumber – is being trashed every year.

Now, a budding ‘build reuse’ movement, made up of environmentalists, architects, historic preservationists, city …

Connecting Communities To Coastal Resilience: Enhancing Sustainability Through Public Participation In Salt Marsh Management And Restoration In Suffolk County, Ny, Jennifer L. Mcgivern

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Coastal resiliency is becoming significantly more critical to the livelihood of coastal communities as the frequency and intensity of storm events increases and is exacerbated by rising sea levels due to climate change. In October 2012 Superstorm Sandy impacted the New York-New Jersey area costing over $70 billion in storm damages and 147 lives lost, as storm surges surpassed record highs for the region. Protruding more than 100 miles into the Atlantic Ocean with over 1,000 miles of shoreline, Long Island is particularly vulnerable to the increasingly ferocious and numerous storms as well as the rising sea levels that climate …

21st Century Ecopoetics And Ecotheory, Robert Balun

Open Educational Resources

Ecopoetics is the study of literature that is concerned with ecology and nature. However, beyond just literature about nature, this course will examine how ecology and nature have become complicated in the 21st century, the age of the Anthropocene, the age of the climate crisis and the 6th mass extinction (don’t worry, we will define these and other key terms).

In the 21st century, humans are now confronted with a growing awareness of their destructive impact on the earth, its environments, and its human and non-human inhabitants. In this class we will examine how ecology and nature have become complicated …

International Migration From The Latin American-Caribbean Region: Taking Environmental Indicators Into Consideration, Chelsea Wepy

Student Theses and Dissertations

International migration, the act of leaving one’s country to permanently settle in another country, is driven by many socio economic/political factors, such as lack of economic opportunity, access to education, governmental corruption, and violence. These factors have proven to be the reason that many citizens within the Latin American-Caribbean region either choose or are forced to relocate internationally. While these factors are important to consider independently; these issues are often exacerbated by changes in the natural environment. The objective of my paper is to highlight the importance of considering changes in the natural environment. In doing so, I hope to …

A Review Of Measuring Ecosystem Resilience To Disturbance, Chuixiang Yi, Nathan Jackson

Publications and Research

Resilience is the central concept for understanding how an ecosystem responds to a strong perturbation, and is related to other concepts used to analyze system properties in the face of change such as resistance, recovery, sustainability, vulnerability, stability, adaptive capacity, regime shift, and tipping point. It is extremely challenging to formulate resilience thinking into practice. The current state-of-art approaches of assessing ecosystem resilience may be useful for policy makers and ecosystem resource managers to minimize climatological or natural disaster related impacts. Here, we review the methods of assessing resilience and classify and limit them to three cases: (1) forest resilience …

Macro - And Microstructure Evaluation And Field Applications Of Concrete With Recycled Glass Pozzolan, Marija Krstic

Dissertations and Theses

Concrete is the most used material in the world, second only to water. Conventional concrete is produced with Portland cement (PC). The production of cement is an energy intensive operation that has raised significant environmental concerns, since one ton of cement generates an equal ton of CO₂. In the USA about 90 million tons of cement are used annually, with 3 million tons used in New York. Most contemporary concrete applications for buildings and infrastructure use high-performance concrete (HPC) mixtures which are produced by replacing a percentage of cement with supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs), consisting mainly of fly-ash …

Past, Present, And Future Of Waste Cooking Oil (Beyond Biofuel), Jihyun Kim

Open Educational Resources

In this project, students in “General Chemistry” will explore the development of a facile, eco-friendly, and simple preparation method of fluorescent carbon dots (CDs) from a mixture of waste cooking oil and orange waste peels. Orange waste peels are one of the most underutilized bio-waste residues on earth, therefore, it would make better sense to utilize a mixture of the two wastes.

As The Clothing Industry Is A Major Polluter, Sustainable Fashion Is Rising, Gabe Herman

Capstones

That the fashion industry is one of the biggest polluters in the world is one of the industry’s best-kept secrets — it uses a quarter of the chemicals produced globally, and its share of the world’s CO2 emissions is expected to rise from 2 percent to 26 percent in the next 30 years. Developing nations — where many factories are located — are most affected. Every year in Bangladesh, for example, tanneries dump enough toxic waste into rivers to fill three Olympic-sized swimming pools. Advocates and some in the fashion world are working to not only get the word out, …

Boundary Spanning At The Science–Policy Interface: The Practitioners’ Perspectives, A. T. Bednarek, C. Wyborn, C. Cvitanovic, R. Meyer, R. M. Colvin, P. F. E. Addison, S. L. Close, K. Curran, M. Farooque, E. Goldman, D. Hart, H. Mannix, B. Mcgreavy, Adam Parris, S. Posner, C. Robinson, M. Ryan, P. Leith

Publications and Research

Cultivating a more dynamic relationship between science and policy is essential for responding to complex social challenges such as sustainability. One approach to doing so is to “span the boundaries” between science and decision making and create a more comprehensive and inclusive knowledge exchange process. The exact definition and role of boundary spanning, however, can be nebulous. Indeed, boundary spanning often gets conflated and confused with other approaches to connecting science and policy, such as science communication, applied science, and advocacy, which can hinder progress in the field of boundary spanning. To help overcome this, in this perspective, we present …

Social Science Perspectives On Drivers Of And Responses To Global, Andrew K. Jorgenson, Shirley Fiske, Klaus Hubacek, Jia Li, Tom Mcgovern, Torben Rick, Juliet B. Schor, William Solecki, Richard York, Ariela Zycherman

Publications and Research

This article provides a review of recent anthropological, archeological, geographical, and sociological research on anthropogenic drivers of climate change, with a particular focus on drivers of carbon emissions, mitigation and adaptation. The four disciplines emphasize cultural, economic, geographic, historical, political, and social‐structural factors to be important drivers of and responses to climate change. Each of these disciplines has unique perspectives and makes noteworthy contributions to our shared understanding of anthropogenic drivers, but they also complement one another and contribute to integrated, multidisciplinary frameworks. The article begins with discussions of research on temporal dimensions of human drivers of carbon emissions, highlighting …

Sustainable Molecular Gelators: Beta-D-Glucoside Derived Structuring Agents And Their Material Application, Julian R. Silverman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Though molecular gelators may by synthesized and formulated into gels following a variety of methods, it should serve that the most valued methods may utilize renewable and waste resources and follow sustainable procedures. Molecular gelators are systems capable of structuring liquids into solid-like materials and they represent a class of surfactant and amphiphilic materials which posses the capability to be not only useful in their ability to form gels, but multifunctional in the ability to respond smartly to a variety of stimuli. Thus there is an interest in the development of sustainable molecular gelators capable of being applied to applications, …

Age And Employee Green Behaviors: A Meta-Analysis, Brenton M. Wiernik, Stephan Dilchert, Deniz S. Ones

Publications and Research

Recent economic and societal developments have led to an increasing emphasis on organizational environmental performance. At the same time, demographic trends are resulting in increasingly aging labor forces in many industrialized nations. Commonly held stereotypes suggest that older workers are less likely to be environmentally responsible than younger workers. To evaluate the degree to which such age differences are present, we meta-analyzed 132 independent correlations and 336 d-values based on 4676 professional workers from 22 samples in 11 countries. Contrary to popular stereotypes, age showed small positive relationships with pro-environmental behaviors, suggesting that older adults engaged in these workplace …

Losing Ground, Alison Kanski

Capstones

Climate change and sea level rise are slowly decimating beaches. But the U.S. government and loyal residents won't let go of the beaches so easily.

A determined resident of the Rockaways in New York fights for the money and attention from governments to sustain his lifelong home and stop it from washing away.

Sustainability Of Dual Water Distribution Systems For Fire Flow Condition, Nazli Yonca Aydin, Larry Mays, Theo G. Schmitt

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

The objective of this study is to compare the sustainability of current water systems when a dual water distribution system (WDS) is used for the non-potable water purposes of fire protection, irrigation, and toilet flushing. Sustainability of urban WDS is evaluated in terms of hydraulic efficiency and water quality. The first step is to assess sustainability of an example urban WDS by using sustainability index (SI). The SI is measured by reliability, resiliency, and vulnerability performance indices. Pressure and water age are selected as main parameters to determine sustainability. Once the SIs for pressure and water age are calculated by …