Campus Sustainability Incubator Fund

According to studies by the State Department, the United States is on a path to an extreme freshwater shortage by 2030. The U.S.’s largest water consumer is power plants. Power plants use 139 billion gallons of freshwater per day for cooling, which amounts to 50% of total U.S. freshwater withdrawals. In a power plant like the MIT Cogeneration Plant (20MW), water losses are 300 gallons/minute, costing $500K/year. Serious water efficiency enhancements, that do not sacrifice fuel efficiency, have to be introduced to cooling systems in order to meet our growing energy demand. 

The Varanasi group proposes to use their water plume collection technology to reduce water usage of cooling towers at the MIT Cogeneration Power plant. They are working in collaboration with MITOS and MIT Facilities to develop a plan for the study. They will first study the water data  collected by MIT Facilities to better understand water usage and identify the losses and opportunities for improvement. They will then place additional sensors at the cooling towers to get a better understanding of the vapor conditions and the plume characteristics. Finally, based on the previous information, they will place our collection device on top of a cooling tower, measure the collection in different weather conditions and for various properties of the applied electric field and use the collected information to further optimize the product.

Building energy consumption was responsible for 97% of MIT’s 2016 greenhouse gas inventory. As such, reducing building environmental impacts is critical to reducing MIT’s environmental footprint. While MIT has worked hard to reduce building energy consumption, there is an opportunity to analyze and optimize the embodied and operational costs and environmental impacts of candidate building designs. Such a rigorous process will help ensure that MIT is seeking sustainable building solutions that consider an integrated approach to energy consumption and building materials.

The project team is made up of researchers who specialize in quantifying early-stage economic and environmental impacts in buildings (Randolph Kirchain and Jeremy Gregory), leaders in MIT’s Campus Construction group (Richard Amster, Wade Berner), and an architect in the Systems Performance and Turnover team of the Campus Construction group who specialize in sustainable design (Randa Ghattas). The team will start with a single building project on MIT’s campus in the planning stage as a test case and use the findings of the case to develop recommendations for an approach that can be used in all campus construction projects.

Laboratory spaces provide a tremendous opportunity for reducing environmental impact and helping MIT reach sustainability and climate reduction goals. Over 7000 researchers at MIT work in labs. Researchers in “wet” labs use disposable gloves as personal protective equipment. In a pilot program in 2016, the Department of Chemical Engineering and MIT Green Labs participants collected over 400 pounds of lab gloves in six months, from about 30 researchers in 10 labs. In setting up the program, they investigated industrial and non-profit partners for glove recycling and partnered with Terracycle. On campus at MIT, they collected uncontaminated gloves in a cubic yard box in the basement of Building 66. Once full, the cubic yard box was then shipped to a facility in New Jersey, where the gloves are cryogenically frozen and grinded into a fine powder to be used in new rubber or plastic based applications. If just half the lab researchers at MIT collected and recycled one pair of gloves a day, over 10 tons of gloves would accumulate per year.

Now that the pilot program has proven to be successful, the team sees an opportunity to assess the feasibility of expanding the program. They aim to perform life cycle analysis on glove recycling, encompassing materials that go into making gloves, using, and re-purposing. Most used gloves at MIT either end up in the trash (uncontaminated) or in a hazardous waste stream (contaminated). Data will be collected on the traditional waste-to-energy disposal (transportation distances, emissions, composition and destination of combustion by-products) of lab gloves in order to assess the net environmental benefit of the project. Data will also be collected on the glove recycling processes (transportation distances, energy and material requirements, and destination of recovered materials).

At the end of the project, the team will determine if recycling gloves has a net environmental benefit. If glove recycling is beneficial, then this project will demonstrate that an integrated Institute-wide program with recycling, facilities, EHS and researchers can and should be established.

For several years, MIT’s FDD system has been collecting data on over 70 campus buildings, and alerting staff when an energy-wasting “fault” is detected. Dahan will apply machine learning and data analysis techniques to this data in order to understand the actual energy savings associated with correcting different types of system faults. The project will aid MIT Facilities in determining which faults to prioritize and help inform a cost-benefit analysis of installing FDD systems in more campus buildings.