Meat Consumption Through the Ages
This project examines how diet quality and environmental sustainability intersect across three generations of a Mexico City cohort, and where the two goals align or trade off for low-income families. Led by Dr. Amanda Crandall (Pediatrics), Dr. Benjamin Goldstein (SEAS), and Dr. Karen Peterson (Nutritional Sciences) at the University of Michigan, in partnership with Dr. Mara Téllez-Rojo at Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública, the team will draw on ELEMENT, an established multigenerational cohort with dietary, health, and biomarker data spanning pregnancy through adolescence. Using life-cycle assessment, the project will first quantify the greenhouse gas footprint of participants' diets at each developmental stage (Aim 1). It will then integrate these environmental estimates with food-processing levels and growth and cardiometabolic outcomes to define the GLOW (Growth, LOw-impact, and Whole foods) dietary profile, a composite score capturing diets that are minimally processed, low-carbon, and health-promoting (Aim 2). Finally, the team will test how maternal GLOW scores predict children's dietary trajectories, identifying when children's diets diverge from a sustainable, healthy pattern (Aim 3).
The work is expected to produce three peer-reviewed manuscripts, one per aim, along with an analytic pipeline linking dietary and environmental data. Findings will lay the groundwork for a larger follow-on proposal expanding into additional sustainability dimensions, such as water use and cost, and for evidence-based dietary guidance that supports both health and environmental goals without widening nutritional inequities in low- and middle-income settings.
Funding: U-M Center for Global Health Equity
Partners: Amanda Crandall, Karen Peterson
SURF Personnel: Akshatha Kuchipudi
Status: Ongoing
AI-Generated image of baby eating bacon cheeseburger
Bioenergy Innovation at the Campus Farm: Electro-fermentation of Waste Biomass into Sustainable Fuel
This project develops and evaluates an electro-fermentation (EF) process that converts crop and food waste from the University of Michigan's Campus Farm into caproate, a precursor for sustainable aviation fuel and other value-added chemicals. Led by Professor Joshua Jack (College of Engineering) and Professor Benjamin Goldstein (SEAS), in partnership with the Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Nichols Arboretum (MBGNA), the research tests agricultural residues, including lettuce, napa cabbage, chard, banana leaf, corncob, and tomato waste, in a single-stage EF reactor combining hydrolysis, fermentation, and reverse beta-oxidation. Despite substantial variation in feedstock composition, every residue converts successfully to caproate, with lettuce achieving one of the highest titers reported in the literature to date. Metagenomic analysis has identified the microbial pathways driving this chain-elongation process, establishing a new link between community composition and caproate yield. Complementing this work, life cycle and techno-economic analyses quantify the carbon footprint and cost of scaling the process, pinpointing extraction and distillation as key optimization targets and a path toward converting crop-waste disposal into revenue.
Beyond the lab, the project is building a lasting Bioenergy Living Learning Laboratory at the Campus Farm and MBGNA Conservatory. Staff help collect feedstocks and co-develop public exhibits and signage, reactors support hands-on teaching in courses at SEAS and the Faculty of Engineering, and the work engages the community through HarvestFest and other public programming.
Funding: U-M Institute for Energy Solutions Living Learning Lab
Partners: Jack Lab, U-M Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Nichols Arboretum
SURF Personnel: Magdalia Cambobasso
Status: Ongoing
LASER - Lifecycle Assessment Synthesized with Ecosystems and Risk
Companies and governments use forest natural climate solutions (fNCS) for their carbon-absorbing capabilities. However, inaccuracies and oversimplifications in carbon accounting often cloud the true impact of fNCS on climate change. Standard assessments inaccurately deem forest biomass carbon neutral or negative, failing to account for emissions from soil and other changes post-harvest, and improperly considering forest regrowth as additional carbon sequestration. Despite critiques in academia, many models still assume forest carbon neutrality, and those that do not tend to lack spatial detail, be overly simplistic, or overlook climate risks. This narrow carbon-centric view risks compromising conservation and community well-being.
This project introduces LASER (Lifecycle Assessment Synthesized with Ecology and Risk) to measure carbon dynamics accurately throughout the fNCS lifecycle, taking into account spatial details and various risks, ensuring a balanced evaluation of fNCS sustainability. LASER is applied to bioenergy, short-lived forest products, and timber in Brazil, Canada, and the United States, merging insights from diverse fields such as forest ecology, industrial ecology, geospatial science, and political ecology.
Funding: U-M Biosciences Initiative - Ideas Lab
Partners: Zhu Lab and U-M Institute for Global Change Biology
Status: Ongoing
SURF Personnel: Elnaz Amirahmadi, Jin Tang, Charlotte Sedlock
Currently seeking postdoc for this project. More details here.
Urban Symbiosis
Cities are global loci of material and energy use and waste generation. Curbing demand for raw resources by circulating urban waste flows will be indispensable as societies transition towards low-carbon, resource efficient futures. To do this, designers, entrepreneurs, citizens, policymakers and academics varyingly advocate for increased symbiosis in cities in the form of mutually beneficial material and energy exchange between different actors in and around cities.
This raises two primary questions:
- Are there different forms of symbiosis in cities?
- If so, what are the attributes of these different forms of symbiosis and what roles might they play in future urban sustainability?
This project answers these questions by:
- Developing a typology of symbiosis in cities through a literature review of existing studies of material and energy sharing in cities.
- Documenting the motivations and outcomes of ongoing urban symbiosis projects in London, UK and Oakland, California
Collaborators: Community non-profits in London, UK, Finn Informal Sustainability Lab, Hawes Human-Environmental Systems Lab
SURF Personnel: Dani Levi, Ben Bartlett
Status: Ongoing
The Sustainability Hoofprint of Meat
This project built a spatially explicit model to map the carbon footprint of meat consumption in twenty of the largest U.S. cities. The team developed MeatS2, a spatial life-cycle assessment model that linked each city's beef, pork, and chicken consumption to the specific rural counties and production facilities supplying it (its "meatshed"), using transport optimization and supply-chain data to trace urban demand back to its geographic source. Rather than treating meat consumption as environmentally uniform, the analysis quantified how greenhouse gas emissions varied across a city's supply chain depending on where its meat was actually produced, revealing carbon-footprint hotspots tied to specific production regions. The project also examined how consumption patterns, and their embodied carbon footprints, varied by income, race, and education across neighborhoods within each city, and complemented the twenty-city analysis with an in-depth case study of Los Angeles's meatshed. By coupling industrial ecology methods, including life-cycle assessment and urban metabolism, with geographic tools such as GIS, the project produced an empirically grounded, spatially resolved account of how urban meat demand drives carbon emissions in distant production regions. Results of the project were published in Nature Food, Nature Climate Change, Nature Communications and other outlets.
Collaborators: The Urban Sustainability Research Group and U-MN Institute on the Environment.
Funding: Generously supported by the National Science Foundation's Environmental Sustainability program.
Status: Complete (2019-2025).
The Carbon Footprint of US Household Energy Use
Residential energy use causes ~20% of US carbon emissions, yet data gaps limit analysis of emissions drivers and mitigation strategies. This project used ‘big data’ to estimate emissions from 93 million individual homes, finding that emissions by wealthy Americans are higher than those of low-income residents, driven primarily by larger homes. Scenarios showed that some states can meet the Paris Agreement through grid decarbonization, while others also need ‘deep energy retrofits’, distributed low-carbon energy systems, and smaller new homes. This work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2020), where it received media coverage from CNN, Associated Press, Scientific American, and was one of the Top 10 research outputs from the University of Michigan in the past decade. Analysis of energy use along lines of race and ethnicity revealed that per capita emission in Communities of Color are higher than in majority Caucasian neighborhoods, even though the latter live in more energy efficient homes. Although smaller homes in Communities of Color explain some of this difference, we showed that this “emissions paradox” is also a consequence of racist, mid-century housing policies that funneled disadvantaged communities into sub-standard housing and forestalled retrofits. Results published in Energy Research and Social Science (2021).
Collaborators: The Urban Sustainability Research Group and Urban Energy Justice Lab at the University of Michigan.
Funding: Generously supported by the National Science Foundation's Environmental Sustainability program.
Status: Complete (2019-2022).
Tracking Corporations Across Space and Time (TRACAST)
Urban consumption impacts distant ‘elsewheres’ via opaque supply chains that cross borders and oceans. This work with Joshua Newell develops a method, TRACAST, to uncover the inner-workings of supply chains; the links between companies, the environmental and social hotpots, and the key nodes of governance. TRACAST empirically connects urban consumption to disruptive environmental and social change at specific, distal locations, with implications for how researchers measure and theorize urban sustainability. Focusing on the corporations that ‘move and shape’ the economy explores the complexity and challenges of sustainable production in a globalized world. Early case work has linked US transnationals to rubber from Sri Lankan biodiversity hotspots and illegally harvested Russian wood. This work has been published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology (2019), Ecological Economics (2019), Journal of Cleaner Production (2021), and Journal of Environmental Management (2021).
Collaborators: Urban Sustainability Research Group
SURF Personnel: Noel Boland
Status: Ongoing.
The Urban FEW-Meter
Large-scale urban agriculture has the potential to substantially disrupt the interconnected water, energy and food systems of cities (the ‘food-energy-water nexus’). This ongoing Belmont Forum project develops a comprehensive database of resource use by ~100 farms in five cities across Europe and North America and uses scenarios to clarify the effects of up-scaling urban farming on the urban FEW nexus. Data on the impact of urban farms on diets, farmer livelihoods, and community development are also collected to appraise urban agriculture across environmental, social and economic dimensions. Preliminary findings suggest that urban agriculture can be a sustainable substitute for conventional agriculture, but that these benefits are only sustained if urban farming is not a transitory land use due to the significant embodied impacts in farm infrastructure.
Collaborators: University of Kent, The University of Michigan, the City University of New York, AgroTech Paris, ILS, and Poznan University of Life Sciences.
Funding: Generously supported by the Belmont Forum and the National Science Foundation.
Status: Complete (2018-2023).
