When: Friday, November 4 at 12PM
Where: 4-231

For more than 30 years, it has been thought that non-hazardous industrial residuals and waste materials are generated in the US at a rate of nearly seven billion metric tons per year -- staggering quantities, especially when compared with the (mere) quarter of a billion tons of MSW generated annually. In fact, this figure crumbles under even modest interrogation, leaving behind a major data gap in the full accounting of material stocks and flows that stymies the deployment of strategies for sustainable development such as industrial symbiosis. This talk will present an innovative method for the robust and reliable estimation of non-hazardous industrial waste in the US and initial results from its application to three industry sectors. It will also introduce the ongoing work to apply the method to an additional 12 sectors and plans for use of the data in evaluating potentials for environmentally beneficial reuse and recycling.
 
Jonathan Krones is a postdoctoral associate at the Center for Industrial Ecology at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a visiting scholar in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. He received his PhD in May 2016 from the MIT Engineering Systems Division / Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.

This event is brought to you by the MIT Waste Alliance with sponsorship from Graduate Student Life Grants (GSLG).