A sabbatical at Yale University
Dr. Ester van der Voet is spending a 4 months sabbatical at Yale University and describes the research she carries out in collaboration with Yale University.
- Introduction
- After duly saving my ADV days for 5 years, I was entitled to a sabbatical leave. Instead of just doing nothing, I decided to spend it on research and publishing. So, I asked the director of the Center for Industrial Ecology of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies of Yale University, Thomas Graedel, whether he would welcome me at his institute for a semester. One thing led to another, and armed with a letter of invitation and a lot of other paperwork I set course for New Haven, the residence of Yale University. The School of Forestry and Environmental Studies is housed in the building shown in the picture.
- Life in New Haven
- One of the interesting things is living in a foreign country and seeing how things work there from the inside. My adventures in this area I publish on my weblog: sabbaticalester.blogspot.com, just for fun for my family, friends and colleagues to read. But I’m not here just for fun - other interesting things are connected to the work I’m actually doing here.
- Industrial Ecology at Yale University
- Thomas Graedel (see his staff page at Yale University) is an expert in the societal metabolism of metals. The Yale STAF project has made accounts of flows of a number of metals through society, worldwide. Their primary angle is that of scarcity and availability, while we at CML, working in the same area, have always been more occupied with environmental impacts and their relation with the stocks and flows in society.
- Research activities
- One of the things I am doing is to supervise, and learn from, a student-operated research project known as the Criticality Project. This is a grant of the National Science Foundation, with the aim of establishing and applying a framework for assessing scarcity problems related to metals. The methodology under construction has two dimensions: assessing availability restrictions, and attaching some kind of a judgment to it: is it a problem or not? Something may be scarce but still the problems connected to that scarcity may be limited, since there are substitutes, or the function is not essential. The project is in its early stages, which I find a fun part: all options still wide open. Also it is very instructive to work on a completely student-performed project. Something to take home for our own MSc program.
- Another thing, also related to metals, is to develop a project proposal for the UNEP Resource Panel. This Panel is established in the image of the well-known IPCC and has the task, among others, “to provide independent scientific assessment of the environmental impacts due to the use of resources over the full life cycle”. Under the Panel, several Working Groups reside. One of them is on metals, chaired by Thomas Graedel. This Working Group will establish six reports, on issues such as scarcity, recycling and recycling potential, development of demand scenarios etc., and one on environmental impacts. I have been asked to write this report, including supervising and editing the contributions of expert colleagues. This work will continue for a long time after my return from New Haven. But Yale is an excellent place to start it.
- A third activity worth mentioning is the writing of an overview article on the environmental implications of biofuels. In this contradictory field, a great many papers have been published over the last year, also by CML, with widely varying outcomes. To systematically discuss this is a difficult task, but one I think I can contribute to in a useful manner, with the help of our CML PhD student Lin Luo as well as the minds of some of my Yale colleagues.
