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Environment

Sustainability

News and Updates

A newly built two-story home with an attached garage has solar panels on the roof.

A House Ahead of Its Time

A decade in, NIST’s superefficient house continues to generate results and advance building science.

Blog Posts

Brad Sutliff wears safety glasses as he stands in the lab in front of a computer monitor.

From Trash to Cash: How AI and Machine Learning Can Help Make Recycling Less Expensive for Local Governments

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A small orange is packaged in a plastic container with a lid.

A Polymer Scientist Wrestles — Literally and Figuratively — With the Frustrations of Plastic Packaging

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A ground-mounted solar panel has a spiderweb crack in the lower left-hand corner.

We Need a Second Earth to Support Our Current Consumption. We Can Do Better if We Think ‘Circular.’

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Projects and Programs

schematic of the scanning droplet cell apparatus

Autonomous Scanning Droplet Cell

Ongoing
Corrosion impacts a broad spectrum of application areas including infrastructure, transportation, and the military. The annual price tag for corrosion mitigation and remediation is 3.4 % of the US GDP. The team is particularly interested in discovering new metallic glasses (metals without long range
NMR-Tubes

Fluid Phase Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Spectroscopy

Ongoing
In-situ vapor-liquid equilibrium (VLE). We are applying vapor-phase NMR to measure VLE in-situ . We are currently applying this methodology to industrially important systems such as refrigerants and natural gas. The most widely used refrigerants have high global warming potential. Drop-in

Macromolecular Architectures

Ongoing
This project’s purpose is to synthesize and characterize model thermoplastics, thermoplastic elastomers (TPE), and mixed resins with systematic variation of polymer sequence, chemistry, and architectures to generate libraries of quantitative structure-property relationships validated by multiple
Graphic of a erlenmeyer flask containing tilled soil, a green leaf, and yellow wheat.

Molecular Innovation in Agriculture

Ongoing
Plant science and breeding aim to develop new plant phenotypes with desired qualities, increased production, disease resistance, and traits that reduce water usage. At the federal level, plant research is conducted by the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) and Agricultural

Publications

A Systems-Based Framework for Product Circularity Assessment

Author(s)
Gisele Bortolaz Guedes, Junwon Ko, Fazleena Badurdeen, I.S. Jawahir, Katherine Morris, Vincenzo Ferrero, Ardeshir Mashhadi, Ryan Bradley
One of the key aspects of Circular Economy (CE), particularly when focusing on the product level, lies in its emphasis on designing products to facilitate the

Tools and Instruments

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