One way the Kummer Institute Center for Resource Sustainability is having an impact is fairly obvious. Over the last year, led by the center director Shelley Minteer, who joined S&T last fall, it’s brought in three industry contracts and three federal grants totaling more than $1 million in funding for research on a range of sustainability topics.
But there’s another, more subtle impact, which is a shift to a more systemic way of thinking about sustainability.
“Sustainability is a theme that runs through water quality and availability, wastewater treatment, energy, mining and the electrification of industry, but in most institutions work in those areas is done separately, in silos,” says Minteer.
That’s changing at S&T. When considering how to make one area more sustainable, Minteer encourages people to also examine how that improvement impacts other areas.
That shift was at the core of the Micro Grand Challenge, which Minteer organized in partnership with Kummer Student Programs and the Opportunities for Undergraduate Research Experiences (OURE). Participating students were given just a few hours on a Sunday afternoon in April to come up with a solution to a problem that exemplifies how Minteer and many in her field look at sustainability: improving sustainability in one area almost always causes a negative impact on sustainability in another.
Wind and sun are sustainable, renewable sources of energy that are much more environmentally friendly than coal or gas. But lithium-ion batteries, which are almost impossible to recycle, are by far the most common means of storing the energy they create. Without storage, solar and wind power can only be used when the sun shines and the wind blows. As the amount of space occupied by wind and solar on the energy grid continues to grow, so does the lithium-ion battery problem.
Noah Johnson, a sophomore in mechanical engineering from Washington, Illinois, and a Kummer Vanguard Scholar, won first place in the challenge. His solution is to replace lithium-ion batteries with sodium batteries, which check nearly all the environmental boxes but do not store energy as efficiently as lithium. That shortcoming is what Johnson will address by conducting his own research, funded by OURE and supervised by Minteer.
Creating research opportunities for S&T students is just the beginning of what Minteer hopes will become a tradition of getting faculty and students involved not just in the center’s activities but in articulating its strategy as well.
“We want to take advantage of the opportunity to leverage our students’ creativity as we think about the future of the Center for Resource Sustainability,” she says. “We are taking a pretty holistic approach to sustainability, and we plan to do much more in areas like wastewater treatment, environmental remediation and carbon capture.”