Sustainable Built Environments Senior Capstone / The study investigates how local-level efforts at sustainability have been implemented in developing countries and Caribbean islands. In order to protect resources and longevity of these regions, communities often adopt sustainable development initiatives with assistance of external support. The goal of this study is to evaluate initiatives taken by similar communities and organizations that have met the needs of ecosystems through sustainable action plans. The combined information gathered in this study will aid St. Croix, USVI in evaluating current practices as well as planning for future actions. The purpose of this research is to develop a case study of local-level sustainable development initiatives for St. Croix, USVI in order to address the needs of community members and environment through evaluations and successful frameworks of similar island communities. Through information collected, an analysis that addresses issues related to improving community for healthier communities via an improved built environment design, will investigate possible forms and systems of successful urban populations. This thesis addresses some of the issues related to improving community design for better civic health outcomes via an improved design and framework policy for the built environment. In order to explore this, the thesis seeks sustainable potentials in urban inner cities and island communities to develop an action plan and design for St. Croix. USVI.

Sustainable Built Environments Senior Capstone Project / This study is an analysis and definition of green building design and zero energy building. This distinguishes the different components that go into net zero building, and the feasibility of making it happen on current buildings, as well as ones in design. The study identifies a building currently in construction on the University of Arizona campus, and identifies its possibility of zero energy and how zero energy would affect the cost and performance of the building. Ultimately it is found that net zero is feasible for the Environmental Natural Resources Building 2 and the University of Arizona, and should be a component in the design and building process of future buildings on campus.

Two key architectural concepts that must be taken into account in every design are sustainability and flexibility. These two ideas are inherently tied to one another. Sustainability refers to ideas and processes that provide solutions meant to better our built environment by using renewable resources, and reducing the amount of energy used in order to ensure our planets well-being for future generations. Flexibility refers to the capability of adaptation in order to accommodate different situations and circumstances. Users will always change through time, while a structure remains the same. The goal of flexibility is to allow a building to evolve as its users do in both long and short term. Rooms can be added or removed, exterior connections can change, and uses of rooms can change throughout the day as spaces are used differently. Flexibility will extend a building's entire life cycle and reducing the need for expensive renovations by making every space multi-use. Each building's entire life cycle should be taken into account during the design phase, and no building should serve as a single use, this idea will also make them more sustainable. These two concepts will also have very important social and economical implications for the users.

Sustainable Built Environments Senior Capstone

<p> A team at the University of Colorado at Boulder is working with the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a novel technical solution for 2.5 billion people in the developing world with no access to basic sanitation. The university's Sol-Char toilet uses concentrated sunlight to convert human fecal sludge into biochar, which has potential as a value-added product. The feasibility of using feces-derived biochar as a solid fuel for heating and cooking is assessed, considering energy content and elemental analysis of biochars made under different reactor conditions, ease of briquetting, and durability of biochar briquettes. Fecal biochars made at 300&deg;C were similar in energy content to wood biochars and bituminous coal, possessing a higher heating value of 25.6 MJ/kg, while fecal chars made at 750&deg;C were significantly lower in energy content at 13.8 MJ/kg. Chars derived from simulant feces favored by other Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation sanitation research projects were found to differ significantly from fecal char in their energy content and briquetting characteristics. A frequently used correlation between elemental composition of chars and their higher heating values was adapted to be more applicable to feces-derived chars based on a review of fecal char literature and experimental results. Fecal chars made at low temperatures and briquetted with molasses and lime binders yielded briquettes of comparable strength and energy content to commercial charcoal briquettes, suggesting that briquettes made from human feces could be a significant contribution to the sanitation value chain.</p>

With the emerging trend of sustainability, sustainable infrastructure is highly regarded by the general public. Sustainable pavement is also a concept that has driven many research motivations today. These motivations are in the form of sustainable paving material utilization, innovative design and construction methods. One of the goals behind these research motivations is maximizing pavement performance using the given funding and resources available. Despite the significant research attention for innovation and actual sustainable pavement practices already commencing, there is no readily available system or score card to quantify sustainable pavement engineering practice. In 2008, the Ministry of Transportation Ontario (MTO) initiated a research project with the University of Waterloo Centre for Pavement and Transportation Technology (UW CPATT) regarding quantifying pavement sustainability. The ultimate goal of the research is to develop a framework for formally incorporating sustainability into pavement engineering for MTO. In order to achieve this goal, the research reviewed the state-of-practice sustainable pavement material and technologies. A sustainable pavement workshop is hosted by CPATT and MTO that invited key stakeholders in Ontario pavement industry for a discussion of sustainable pavement. The environment and economic benefits of different technologies are explored to understand their sustainable elements. Indicators to measure pavement sustainability are proposed based on the recent MTO GreenPave evaluation program and life cycle cost of pavements. Lastly, network level pavement management and ideas to improve sustainability at network level is examined.

<p> This dissertation is an ethnography of human-soil relations that examines the cultural, scientific, political-economic, and ethical stakes of alternative agricultural practices and life processes that resist military-led, growth-oriented development. Moving across laboratories, greenhouses, forests and farms, it weaves together a symmetrical analysis of two kinds of local-practitioners&mdash;soil scientists in the capital city of Bogot&aacute; and small farmers in the southwestern frontier department of Putumayo&mdash;to track how soils emerge with political importance in the construction of what I call agro-life proposals for peace in the Colombian Amazon. Theoretically, it interrogates concepts of "sustainability" emerging among scientists and farmers, suggesting they imply a complex reframing of liberal notions of property, health, wellbeing, labor and autonomy. These observations reimagine the interface between political economy and ecology and science and technology studies that can account for new ecological notions of territoriality linked to practices of economic 'degrowth', and the alternative agricultural life-worlds I encountered in southwestern Colombia.</p>

<p>Given the threats of climate change along with limited natural resources, colleges and universities are in a position to role model sustainable practices and provide opportunities for students to learn how to live more sustainable lives. Campus housing departments are well positioned to implement sustainability education programs for their residential students. Residential college students are often less motivated to engage in sustainable living behaviors because they perceive minimal control over their living environment and are not held accountable for their resource consumption. This study evaluated the effect the No Impact Jack Sustainable Living Certificate program had on promoting and sustaining behavior change in residential college students. The program design applied the theory of planned behavior, which uses reported behavioral beliefs, normative beliefs, and control beliefs to predict behavioral intention for performing the target behaviors. This study identified barriers and motivations for engaging in sustainable living behaviors, as perceived by first year residential students, alongside the testing of certain Community Based Social Marketing strategies including public commitment, social norms, and incentives. The No Impact Jack program was most successful in helping participants maintain their current behaviors and affirming their motivations for engaging in sustainable behaviors in the context of a new and slightly more challenging living environment. Those who participated in the No Impact Jack program were less susceptible than the other research participants to the perceived barriers (control beliefs) encountered in this new environment. Participation in the No Impact Jack program helped them learn more about sustainable living behaviors in the college environment and the certificate on the door provided additional motivation for holding themselves accountable to the commitment they made. The results provided direction on what type of education and programmatic outreach to provide to residential college students in order to facilitate and maintain desired behavior changes. </p>

<p> Many homes in northeast rural China are not heated sufficiently during the winter months. Rural residents use a traditional system of a stove and Chinese Kang to heat their homes. The current system is inefficient and requires high levels of fuel consumption. The kang system was researched with the goal of creating a simplified system modeling program. Using existing literature and data provided by Dalian University of Technology, a computer model was built. The model is modular with the aim to assist in designing and optimizing the domestic kang heating system. A basic model was created using Excel and Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). The output of the basic model was calibrated and a sensitivity analysis of the variables was performed. Once the base scenario of the model's output was verified, improvements were modeled and tested. Some of the improvement scenarios tested include: adding a heat exchanger and radiator system to the existing kang set up, increased building insulation and the placement of phase change material on the surface of the kang. The results from a myriad of scenarios were evaluated on their technical ability to increase domestic comfort. Additionally, input from local communities was used to assess rural residents' heating needs and their acceptability of possible solutions. The technical solutions that were developed must be economic, environmentally satisfactory and culturally sensitive. Results from the completed model and information gathered from the rural communities provided a framework of optimization. An economic analysis was used to evaluate the long term feasibility of possible optimized improvements. It was determined that the addition of a room radiator system, consisting of a heat exchanger, water tank, thermostat controls and a panel radiator, delivered the most economical solution in regards to the increasing the resident's comfort per dollar invested. Furthermore, many rural homes in the northeast already have coal fired boiler and radiator systems installed. Removing the coal boiler and replacing it with a stove heat exchanger, lessens the household's dependence on coal while still providing adequate comfort during the coldest months of the year. This improved solution meets a concord of technical, social and environmental needs and should be investigated further.</p>

<p> An individual narrative relating subjective experience with communal social norms and practices is the modern way of understanding identity. Modern science also bridges the gap between a subjective experience and theoretical knowledge. In translating from the micro-social level of direct experience to the macro-social or collective experience, the particular and the subjective tend to be drowned out by conceptual totalities. Consumer capitalism however, at its extreme virtual limits, makes subjective experience central, and pushes metaphysical idealism back. The artist's knowledge, acquired through the juxtaposition of the human self at its most intimate level with the general or objective order of materials, also erodes a modern metaphysics. Language in psychoanalysis allows us to engage in self-identification and discover the subject within the spoken or written word by uncovering traces of an illicit desire that is repressed in metaphysics and rationalism. Psychoanalysis provides insight into how the decoded social space of capitalist production can be reconfigured as a meaningful space of subjective desire. Today's ubiquitous digital discourse, coupled with the universality of a machine time in the increasingly mechanized market, gives us globalization. A form of consciousness defined by the operations of the market recognizes the interwoven functions of humans and technologies/materials in a wide and complex production&mdash;including economic and social/cultural aspects. Outside of the dialectical structure of modern knowledge, social identity can only be a temporary coalescence of a subject that is staked upon a set of events of a specific and foundational significance. As a modern polarity of identity and negation is closed with globalization, social identity becomes situated with respect to a global information economy that increasingly reflects, not commodity objects and alienated subjects, but difference as such: capitalist production is nothing but the unbreakable rhythm that rearticulates a homogeneous Globality with each of its cycles. Under these conditions, otherness is an intelligible difference, rather than a repressed periphery of the ego ideal. As difference or alterity beyond the identity of subject and object, the Other is the counterpart of the void that is subjectivity itself. In the knowledge economy primarily constituted as the production of difference, subjectivity and otherness are modalities of a more thorough ecological integration with the environment.</p>