Computational Industrial Ecology

Modern society is unsustainable. This fact highlights the imperative for transformational change to the industrial system and the materials basis of modern society, i.e., the ‘total materials system’. ‘Computational industrial ecology’ is an emerging approach that aims to leverage data and modelling tools to quantify the total materials system in order to understand how to improve its efficiency and reduce its environmental burdens. The Industrial Ecology Team is currently working towards this aim by developing a data structure for sustainability science data, a relational database to efficiently contain these data for querying, and an algorithm to unify these data into a model of the total materials system. In this seminar, we will introduce industrial ecology, discuss current research activities, and identify some potential areas for future research.

Rupert J. Myers is a Lecturer in Chemical Engineering: Industrial Ecology at the University of Edinburgh. His scholarly journey through various engineering and science disciplines, from Melbourne to Sheffield, EMPA, Berkeley, Yale, MIT, and Edinburgh, has been driven by a mission to reduce environmental burdens via sustainable engineering. He currently champions this mission by leading University learning in industrial ecology, and by focussing his research on globally pervasive materials that are virtually unmatched in importance to society, such as cement and metals. In 2015 he was awarded the Mike Sellars Medal for best PhD thesis in the University of Sheffield’s Department of Materials Science & Engineering.

Zoë Petard is a PhD Candidate in Chemical Engineering: Industrial Ecology at the University of Edinburgh. Through her study and work in the chemical, environmental and software engineering fields, she has lived in Montréal (McGill), Switzerland (EPFL), Singapore and Edinburgh. Her research interests centre on using informatics and engineering tools to tackle sustainability challenges, in particular using software solutions to transform today’s urban centres into sustainable cities. In Edinburgh, her research focus is on the development of a unified data model to consolidate the widespread material stocks and flows body of knowledge into one open database.