A Tale of Two Sustainable Cities

While the circular economy—in which products and materials are by design kept in continual use—is being discussed at the highest levels of government and global organizations, cities, and communities are the front line of implementation. Getting a circular economy to work in practice requires collaboration among government, businesses, local stakeholders, and everyone in between. 

To that end, Pitt and the University of Georgia are partnering to develop a circular economy model for cities worldwide. Pitt’s Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation (MCSI) and Swanson School of Engineering, along with Georgia’s College of Engineering, are leading “A Tale of Two Cities: Optimizing Circularity from Molecules to the Built Environment,” supported by $750,000 from the NSF’s Convergence Accelerator, which is supporting 16 multidisciplinary teams advancing the circular economy.

“We’re connecting and converging a path forward toward a circular economy across multiple materials and scales, and we’re doing it in two large metropolitan areas in geographically different regions,” says Melissa Bilec, MCSI co-director, special assistant to the provost for sustainability, and William Kepler Whiteford Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the Swanson School. “If we are successful, this model could be translated to other locations, maybe eventually scaling to thousands of cities.”

Bilec and Pitt Distinguished Service Professor Eric Beckman are co-principal investigators, working with industry, government, and non-profit partners to examine all levels of circularity, from the molecular level to the built environment. Georgia Professor of Environmental Engineering Jenna Jambeck is leading the team. 

Over the next year, the researchers will use the Circularity Assessment Protocol developed by Jambeck’s Circularity Informatics Lab to collect community-level data on material usage and management—looking at local product design and the built environment, waste collection, and infrastructure, and what kinds of materials could contaminate the environment. 

Some of the data will be publicly available through the Debris Tracker open-access tool developed by Jambeck’s lab, which allows users to log litter and plastic pollution in their communities. An important part of the project is listening to the community’s needs and opinions concerning pollution, environmental justice, and more, says Bilec.