Transportation and Industrial Ecology – making sustainability sustainable?

February 7, 2016 |

BD-TS-020815-symbiosis-smReal-world Industrial Ecology Projects and NREL’s Sustainable Mobility projects show a way forward that EPCOT once charted in our stars.

This year marks the 50th year since Walt Disney died, and every year it becomes more clear how transformative he was at changing the way we bring stories to life. He was more than a showman — though that he was — he altered the way we experience entertainment, science, fantasy, history, imagination, and innovation.

Near the end, when he had achieved great success with Disneyland, he concieved of his most ambitious project, one that was never completed. Designed to rething forever integrated communities we live in — a blend of transport, building and community design, and advanced industry.

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After all, as population and affluence rise, so too grow the demands for infrastructure and resources. Now, the planet’s not going to fall out of the solar system if we over-use scarce resources. The planet will do just fine. The progress of human civilization may, ahem, however be in for a rough patch. As any student of the Dark and Middle Ages can tell you — a breakdown in industrial activity is not for the faint of heart.

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Walts’ antidote? He called it the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrrow, and the pursuit of EPCOT was one of the reasons that the land base of Walt Disney World is so darn large, There was supposed to be a community of 10,000 people living there, that was never built.

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The EPCOT you can visit borrowed the name, but not the spirit of Disney’s concept. Following Walt’s death, his successors at Disney scaled back the EPCOT concept into a sort of permanent World’s Fair of national exhibits, rides, and pavilions that would talk up the technologies that EPCOT was originally expected to deploy. But it’s really EPODICOT, when you think of it. An Entertaining Presentation Of Discarded Ideas for a Community of Tomorrow.

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A few years back, many of Walt Disney’s ideas came back into vogue under the general descriptor “sustainability” and “sustainable design” and “sustainable transport”.

Let’s look today at advances in industrial and transportation ecology. For those concerned about the environment, herein are opportunities to do more with less, and to keep waste out of landfill. For those more interested in entreprenurial opportunity — why, there’s money in good ideas needed on a global basis, as there always is. For those less interested in saving the planet or making a bunch of money, think of it as an opportunity to find noble, engrossing, diverting activities to interest youg people in.

First, let’s shine a light on an integrated series of initiatives designed to reduce unecessary travel, low-carbon fuels, energy use, greenhouse gas emissions — and increase traveler safety and productivity. That’s the broad canvas of Sustainable Mobility. The Natuonal Renewable Energy Laboratory has been hard at work on this. They conclude that “Early analysis points to considerable energy-saving potential—up to 90% by 2050” To back that claim up, they host an overview of the activity here.

http://www.nrel.gov/transportation/sustainable-mobility-initiative.html

It requires one big change in mental framework. Namely, changing our view of transportation from a system of “vehicles and roads” to an integrated “network of travelers, services, and environments”.

For example, consider, in the world of electrics, using vehicles to balance urban electrical demand. If buildings and vehicles work in an integrated harmony, you can use more (low cost) base load and less (expensive) peak load production to produce everyday electricity. Or, the strategy of “platooning” vehicles which permit cars to travel much closer together and reduce aerodynamic drag as well as traffic congestion.

But it can be something far simpler, such as parking space locations. How much time and energy is wasted cruising for ideal parking spots — where the pursuit of convenience leads to unintended negative consequences such as higher emissions. All those are in the area of vehicle automation.

Or, consider how we design and incentivize carpooling and the use of public transit. Or, how we communicate to each other about road conditions and traffic flow to prevent congestion with on-the-spot alternatives. Decision science and integrated transport system manegement can play a role.

Or, why not better understand how to design transport that better fits with the buildings and zoning of our cities and rural areas. Reducing the number of trips needed to maintain supplies for the home and business. Reducing energy consumption between home, businesses, schools, shops and so on.

Sometimes, schemes that are efficient for the cost of one type of building (for example, schools) cause outlandish negative consequwnces when it comes to energy use — essentially, transferring the cost of inefficiency from one sector (the building and maintencne of schools) to another sector (the building and maintenance of vehciles and roads).

That’s the world of interaction with what they call the built environment and you and I call the community.

More on sustainable mobility

Platooning trucks, here.
NREL’s Connected Traveler project, part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s new Travel Response Architecture using Novel Signaling for Network Efficiency in Transportation (TRANSNET) program
An NREL study shows that a campus-sized (ranging from four to 10 square miles) automated mobility district has the potential to reduce fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by 4% to 14%
DOE’s Transportation Energy Futures project identify emerging and disruptive technologies
Transportation demand reduction strategies
Changes in the built environment
Colorado’s $20 million RoadX transportation project.
This animation depicts a potential future transportation scenario in which electric vehicles can be recharged via electrified roadways

Looking at industrial symbiosis

Turns out, you can no only look at mobility as an interconnected series of people, markets, companeis and needs. You can look at all of industry that way.

Around the world today, we have some examples of integrated industrial systems — where communities reduce waste and consumption through a connected overall design that delivers the wastes from one industrial process as the feedstock of another, and where homes are integrated into the overall design so that there are no-energy (passive energy) homes that generate all the energy they need through a combiantion of using waste and reducing load, as well as low-energy homes that use the saem strategies but less intensively. Kalundborg, Denamrk is the shining example, and worth a look if you don’t mind the blustery conditions west of Copenhagen.

We have come illustrated industrial symbioses worth knowing in our profile, The Digest’s 2016 Guide to Industrial Symbiosis, here.

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