The GLRPPR Blog

The webinar archive is available for viewing at https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/280645215. If you view the archive, please fill out the webinar evaluation at https://illinois.edu/sb/sec/2218068. Your feedback helps us improve to better meet your information needs. The evaluation form will be available until August 1, 2013.

The slides from the webinar are available for download at http://hdl.handle.net/2142/44849.

TRI.NET, a downloadable application that allows you to select, sort, and filter TRI data, is available at http://www.epa.gov/tri/tridotnet/. This tool allows you combine TRI with other data sources, display your results on a map, and export your results into other applications for further analysis.

Links to TRI P2 materials, as well as many other resources useful to P2 practitioners, are available on GLRPPR’s Pollution Prevention 101 LibGuide. The guide is continuously updated to bring you the tools to help you do your job better.

If you have questions or or comments about the TRI’s P2 data tools, you can contact Daniel Teitelbaum directly at Teitelbaum.daniel@epa.gov or call him at (202) 566-0964.

Director
Illinois Sustainable Technology Center
Prairie Research Institute
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign invites applications and nominations for the position of Director of the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center. For over 25 years, the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC) has been a leader at both the state and the national level in promoting industrial ecology, pollution prevention, natural resource conservation, and sustainability research, education and outreach. It was established by the Illinois General Assembly and is one of the five surveys comprising the Prairie Research Institute. By integrating environmental research, technical assistance, demonstrations, and communication, ISTC acts as a catalyst to improve economic vitality, encourage efficient use and conservation of resources, and achieve a healthier, sustainable future for the people of Illinois.

The Director will lead the Center in the execution of its mission and in maintaining and enhancing its tradition of excellence.

We seek candidates with national visibility, proven leadership and managerial skills and a commitment to promoting sustainability.

Specific Duties and Responsibilities

• Provide vision and leadership to the staff of ISTC to help the organization best carry out its mission, including strategic planning processes, action plans, accountability frameworks, and performance reporting systems.
• Inspire, empower, and mentor staff to achieve success and foster a culture of innovation and high level performance at both the individual and organizational level.
• Encourage organizational structures that promote quality improvement, group processes, and stakeholder involvement.
• Lead the conceptual development and delivery of organizational products and services.
• Direct and manage development of budgets, and policies and procedures related to oversight of human resources, buildings, and equipment.
• Advance the Prairie Research Institute’s mission by serving on the Institute’s management team; and promote the University’s goals of encouraging student mentorship, experiential learning, and collaboration with university faculty.
• In concert with the Prairie Research Institute leadership team, advice and counsel policymakers and elected officials at the local, state, and national level; and actively engage with public and private groups, industry, media, peer organizations, and the public on sustainability issues.
• Network with key staff from federal and state agencies, corporations, and foundations, as well as assist in attracting funding from these organizations in support of the Center’s mission.
• Build partnerships with public and private organizations to obtain and leverage the necessary resources to advance programs and services.

Qualifications

• Graduate degree required; PhD preferred.
• Demonstrated leadership, managerial, and supervisory ability.
• Demonstrated ability to conceptualize, lead, and build successful programs that enhance public good by influencing private sector activity, government policy, or social change.
• Outstanding communication, facilitation, and interpersonal skills.
• Experience in grant-writing and fundraising.
• Understanding of and appreciation for sustainable technologies and practices.

The Director position is a benefits eligible, academic professional position appointed on a 12-month service basis. Salary range is $155,000 to $165,000 annually. The expected start date is as soon as possible.

TO APPLY: This posting will remain open until filled. To apply, all candidates must submit an online profile through https://jobs.illinois.edu by the close of the posting period. Qualified candidates must upload a letter which details qualifications noted above, resume, and the names and contact information of three professional references. All requested information must be submitted for the application to be considered. Incomplete information will not be reviewed.

For further information regarding application requirements, please contact Susan Key, Human Resources, susankey@illinois.edu.

For technical questions, please contact: Dr. Nandakishore Rajagopalan, Search Chair, nrajagop@illinois.edu.

The University of Illinois is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. The administration, faculty, and staff embrace diversity and are committed to attracting qualified candidates who also embrace and value diversity and inclusivity. www.inclusiveillinois.illinois.edu.

In a working paper from Harvard Business School entitled “Pay for Environmental Performance: The Effect of Incentive Provision on Carbon Emissions”, researchers Robert G. Eccles, Ioannis Ioannou, Shelley Xin Li, and George Serafeim analyzed the incentive structures of climate change management for a sample of large, predominantly multinational organizations, then characterized and assessed the effectiveness of different types of incentive schemes that corporations have adopted to encourage employees to reduce carbon emissions. Some of their key findings include:

• Monetary incentives are associated with higher carbon emissions.
• Non-monetary incentives are associated with lower carbon emissions.
• When employees perceive their action as socially positive, the adoption of non-monetary incentives might be more effective than monetary incentives in reducing carbon emissions.
• For tasks involving socially positive behavior, monetary incentives are not effective and actually detrimental unless they are provided to people for whom such tasks constitute part of their formal job responsibility.

The EPA TRI Program released an enhanced version of the TRI Pollution Prevention (P2) Search in Envirofacts, featuring new and more powerful ways to search the TRI database for P2 activities reported by TRI facilities.

You’ll now be able to:

• Use multi-select capabilities to focus your P2 search on one or more industries, chemicals, states, or years
• Use “type ahead” features to search by keyword, industry code, or chemical
• Search using predefined chemical groupings, such as Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPs) or Persistent Bioaccumulative and Toxic (PBT) chemicals
• Sort results to find reported P2 activities corresponding with the largest reductions in releases to specific environmental media, overall releases, or total waste managed

Catch Up on the Most Recent TRI P2 Webinar

Did you miss last month’s TRI webinar? Don’t worry – you can still learn how to find, analyze, and visualize TRI’s P2 data! The recording, transcripts, and presentation slides from “Exploring TRI’s Pollution Prevention Information” are now available at www.chemicalright2know.org/2013-webinars/spring-2013-webinar.

For additional background on TRI and P2, visit www.epa.gov/tri/p2 and the resources on www.chemicalright2know.org.

The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) has launched SciTech Connect, a new portal to free, publicly available DOE research and development (R&D) results. SciTech Connect incorporates the contents of two of the most popular core DOE collections and employs an innovative semantic search tool enabling scientists, researchers and the scientifically- attentive public to retrieve more relevant information. OSTI plans to gradually phase out its current DOE Information Bridge and Energy Citations products and replace them with the improved search interface of SciTech Connect.

OSTI developed the new resource to help increase access to science, technology and engineering research information from DOE and its predecessor agencies. SciTech Connect represents one of the largest deployments of semantic search by a federal agency to date.

“OSTI historically has been a leader in pioneering the use of new technologies to make more DOE and federal science accessible to more people more conveniently than ever before,” said OSTI Director Walter Warnick. “Now, with SciTech Connect, we are expanding deployment of innovative semantic search technology to make DOE R&D results easier to retrieve and thereby better serve our dual core mission – getting DOE results out to the scientific community and beyond, and getting the community’s results into DOE.”

Consolidated in SciTech Connect, DOE Information Bridge and Energy Citations accounted for approximately half of the 298 million transactions OSTI handled in 2012. OSTI will work to ensure a smooth transition for patrons as it consolidates these two web-based services into SciTech Connect.

Product Scope

SciTech Connect contains all the full-text documents and citations previously found in Information Bridge and Energy Citations Database. Thus, SciTech Connect contains over sixty-five years of energy-related citations created and/or collected by OSTI. There are over 2.5 million citations, including citations to 1.4 million journal articles, 364,000 of which have digital object identifiers (DOIs) linking to full-text articles on publishers’ websites. SciTech Connect also has over 313,000 full-text DOE sponsored STI reports; most of these are post-1991, but close to 85,000 of the reports were published prior to 1990.

SciTech Connect includes technical reports, bibliographic citations, journal articles, conference papers, books, multimedia, and data information sponsored by DOE through a grant, contract, cooperative agreement, or similar type of funding mechanism from the 1940s to today. This collection continues to grow as new scientific and technical information resulting from DOE research becomes available.

The records for the early years represent a comprehensive worldwide collection of nuclear science literature. In addition to reports from the Atomic Energy Commission and other U.S. Government agencies, this collection includes numerous non-governmental publications, as well as foreign and foreign language material. In the mid-1970s, the scope of the database expanded to cover all forms of energy-related scientific and technical information.

Semantic Search

With the release of SciTech Connect, OSTI is expanding its deployment of semantic search, an innovative technology to radically improve the quality and relevance of search results across the majority of its DOE content. Semantic search is a way to enhance search accuracy contextually. Rather than relying on search algorithms that identify a specific query term, semantic search uses more complex contextual relationships among people, places and things. It is an especially effective search approach when a person truly is researching a topic (rather than trying to navigate to a particular destination).

SciTech Connect employs a semantic search technique known as keyword-to-concept mapping. It accepts keyword-based queries and returns concept-mapped queries as in a taxonomy; a search term is mapped to other associated terms, including narrower and related concepts.

In this way, semantic search enables the new SciTech Connect search engine to recognize and make use of the logical relations among concepts in different scientific documents, regardless of whether those documents use standard descriptors to express those concepts. As a consequence, even the casual user easily recognizes the superiority of semantic search results over traditional word/phrase search results in a side-by-side comparison.

SciTech Connect also includes a number of other features, including basic and advanced search; faceting; in-document search; word clouds; and personalization which allows users to save searches, define alerts based on saved searches and create and manage document libraries.

Transition Details

While SciTech Connect will eventually replace DOE Information Bridge and Energy Citations Database, the transition will be gradual and seamless. The transition period should be completed in July 2013. Because SciTech Connect provides improved access to all the information previously available via DOE Information Bridge and Energy Citations Database, OSTI recommends that users bookmark this new product and start using it as their primary access point to OSTI’s collection of DOE research and development results.

Tuesday, May 7, 1-2 pm CDT
Register at https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/6597474733924842752

There have been over 100 published psychological experiments that have attempted to get people to do the right thing for the environment. These experiments have covered many different kinds of behaviors (recycling, energy conservation, etc.) and have used many different ways of motivating people (incentives, information, feedback, etc.) What is the big picture that comes from all of this research? In this webinar, Dr. Richard Osbaldiston will discuss his recent meta-analysis of these studies, and he will share what we know—and what we don’t know—about promoting pro-environmental behaviors.

About the speaker: Richard Osbaldiston has been studying environmental issues for over 15 years as both an engineer and a psychologist. He is equally comfortable talking about kilowatt hours or intrinsic motivation. And in fact, it is the marriage of these disciplines that gives the greatest insight into we what need to do to change behavior and protect our environment.

This event is part of the P2Rx Social Media and Behavior Change webinar series.

For the past quarter-century, the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) has provided information about toxic chemicals released from industrial facilities in communities across the nation.  In addition to informing citizens of releases in their areas, however, TRI also contains a plethora of information about pollution prevention activities and how, in many cases, facilities have switched to safer chemicals or safer waste management alternatives.  Now, information about effective pollution prevention practices is easier to access than ever.

To find out more, join the Environmental Council of the States (ECOS), the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA), and the National Pollution Prevention Roundtable’s Safer Chemistry Challenge Program for the free webinar: Exploring the Toxics Release Inventory’s Pollution Prevention Information:  A New Resource and a P2 Provider’s Perspective, on March 20, 2013 from 2:00-3:30 pm EDT.  Register at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/269134136.

This webinar will provide an overview of the pollution prevention and waste management data collected by the TRI Program and introduce participants to a new search tool that makes this information easy to access, visualize, and use.  Additionally, participants will hear about the Minnesota Technical Assistance Program (MnTAP), how they use the TRI information, and how they plan to integrate the new pollution prevention tool into their outreach activities.

Featured speakers will include:

• Daniel Teitelbaum, Pollution Prevention Staff Lead, TRI Program Division, Office of Environmental Information, US EPA
• Laura Babcock, Ph.D., Director, MnTAP
• Robert Lundquist, Senior Engineer, MnTAP

The DEQ recently was recognized by an International environmental group for its pollution prevention efforts.

The department was a 2012 North America Gold winner of the International Green Apple Award for Environmental Best Practices by The Green Organisation, an independent, non-political, non-profit organization that recognizes, rewards, and promotes environmental best practices around the world.

The DEQ received the award in recognition of the pollution prevention achievements of its Retired Engineer Technical Assistance Program. The RETAP is recognized for its effectiveness in providing voluntary pollution prevention technical assistance to small businesses through on-site assessments with recommendations to eliminate waste, conserve resources, and increase process and energy efficiencies.

The RETAP has identified more than $40,000 in potential cost savings per assessment. On average, companies implement, or make plans to implement more than 70 percent of RETAP recommendations within two years of receiving their assessment report.

The RETAP conducts nearly 100 assessments each year. The assessments are free, confidential, non-regulatory and objective. Any business with 500 or fewer full-time employees in Michigan and institutions of any size may request a RETAP assessment.  

For additional information about the RETAP, including how to receive a P2 and energy conservation assessment, go to www.michigan.gov/retap or contact David Herb at herbd@michigan.gov or 517-241-8176.