Podcasts about golisano institute

Five years ago, AI was hardly a priority on higher ed campuses. Now it's becoming mandatory coursework. At the Golisano Institute for Business & Entrepreneurship in Rochester, students now take 12 credits of coding, analytics, and AI. And the institute will be launching a new AI and Business program. For students who don't want to learn AI, will they be left behind in the future job market? Our guests discuss the challenge of preparing students for a very different world. In studio: Ian Mortimer, president of Golisano Institute for Business & Entrepreneurship Max Post, student at Golisano Institute for Business & Entrepreneurship and artificial intelligence engineer for New Vision Development Group

Bob talks to Van Stanley of People's Choice Kitchen about speaking at the Golisano Institute, Bob talks about the RPD officers punished for helping ICE, and Bob talks to President Geoff Wiater and Vice President Paul Dondorfer of the Rochester Locust Club about the situation.

In this podcast episode, Kc Rossi, an Integrative Leadership Coach, recounts her experience speaking at the Golisano Institute for Business and Entrepreneurship. She discussed "Architecting Wholistic Wealth," which involves creating success across all life aspects, not just financial. Rossi introduced the "six slices of the pie" concept, covering physical, emotional, financial, spiritual, connective, and collective well-being. She highlighted the WOOP method (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan) as a tool for achieving goals, emphasizing the importance of addressing each step, particularly anticipating obstacles. This message is about nurturing every facet of one's being for sustainable success and using WOOP to turn dreams into actionable plans. Episode Mention: WOOP

In this episode, Ajay Khaladkar, former Technical Program Manager, Golisano Institute for Sustainability, Rochester Institute of Technology, discusses how the institute is helping companies transition to Industry 4.0. Humanity is in relentless pursuit of enhancing living standards and creating a more comfortable existence. Every major effort to advance society using human intellect and technology has not only induced socioeconomic ripples but also transformed the world — starting from the first industrial revolution in the 1700s, also known as Industry 1.0, to the digital transformation we are witnessing today: Industry 4.0.  As technology is rapidly evolving and new frameworks are being introduced, experts point out that the periods between industrial revolutions are decreasing. A good transition strategy can help traditional businesses to successfully adapt to the latest transformation metrics.  Ajay Khaladkar, former Technical Program Manager of Advanced Manufacturing and Industry 4.0 Solutions at Golisano Institute for Sustainability, Rochester Institute of Technology, discusses how the institute is supporting organizations' transition to Industry 4.0, the challenges and what to expect after the transition. Key takeaways: It is noted that the periods between industrial revolutions are getting smaller and we may enter Industry 5.0 quicker, with the emergence of new technologies and the fast, widespread integration of information. Industry 4.0 is considered as a catalyst for better, sustainable goals and may bring societal shifts, such as in job profiles and social equity. Industry 4.0 is more complex than its previous counterparts for calculating returns on investment, because some Industry 4.0 tools will not replace workforce, but help empower leaders to make agile, reliable decisions.

A Great Business Education Accessible For All with higher ed administrator Ian Mortimer The awesome sponsor we want to spotlight today is Golisano Institute. Let's meet our special guest Ian Mortimer. We're thrilled to be speaking with you, Ian. Welcome! What are five things you will learn in this episode? What is the story behind The Golisano Institute for Business & Entrepreneurship? How does Golisano Institute work? Who are Golisano Institute's ideal students? What kinds of outcomes will Golisano Institute students and graduates experience? What should someone curious about Golisano Institute know about it? ABOUT GOLISANO INSTITUTE The Golisano Institute for Business & Entrepreneurship is predicated on the belief that everyone can successfully participate in the job market and economy if given a chance.  Through its 24-month, accelerated, curriculum, students can gain the knowledge and networks that make them immediately relevant and valued by employers.  Embedded in the curriculum are courses on entrepreneurship, project management, computer coding, personal finance, and some of the other more common courses in areas such as finance, marketing, and accounting.  However, the key curricular distinctiveness is highlighted by its integration with employers.  An employer network of more than 50 organizations work in tandem with students and serve as mentors, recruiters, and inspirers.  The Institute is deeply committed to providing opportunity for all students, regardless of their means and resources.  Via the generosity of Tom Golisano, businessman and philanthropist, students pay a low tuition of $8,900 per year (which includes all books, feels and technology) and financial assistance is available for those that require support.  If one can imagine an educational environment that is truly community-based, has faculty and staff that are great mentors as well as teachers, and is tightly connected to economic opportunities via a great business community, you will see the Institute in action at 150 Sawgrass Drive in Rochester, New York.  The schedule is fixed so students can plan their lives and should accommodate students with various competing priorities.  There is not another educational opportunity in the United States that provides as much business education and mentorship for the price as the Golisano Institute for Business & Entrepreneurship.  Whether you are a graduating high school senior seeking a next step that allows you to pursue your dream of starting your own business, or an adult that wants to reestablish themselves in the job market, the Institute is eager to help all that are motivated and qualified. For more information, please contact Maren Welch at mwelch@golisanoinstitute.org or visit https://golisanoinstitute.org. ABOUT THIS PODCAST Tests and the Rest is THE college admissions industry podcast. Explore all of our episodes on the show page. ABOUT YOUR HOSTS Mike Bergin is the president of Chariot Learning and founder of TestBright. Amy Seeley is the president of Seeley Test Pros. If you're interested in working with Mike and/or Amy for test preparation, training, or consulting, feel free to get in touch through our contact page.

Bob talked to Ian Mortimer, the president of Golisano Institute, talking about their programs. He also talked about smash-and-grab robberies.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, food is the single largest category of material sent to landfills in the US, where it emits the greenhouse gas methane. It would be a win for climate if food waste could instead be transformed into commercially valuable products. Today, we're talking with two researchers who are working out the feasibility of just that. Welcome to the Leading Voices in Food podcast. Our guests for today are sustainability and energy science researcher Thomas Trabold of the Golisano Institute for Sustainability at Rochester Institute of Technology. And second, we have food science and technology researcher Ned Spang from the University of California Davis Food Loss and Waste Collaborative. Interview Summary   This podcast is cosponsored by the RECIPES food waste research collaboration, led by American University and funded by the National Science Foundation.   Norbert: So Ned, how does wasted food contribute to climate change?   Ned: That's a great question, Norbert, and something we should be thinking about when we are talking about food loss and waste. Really, at all times. As you said in your intro, there is a close connection between food waste and greenhouse gas emissions along the pathway of methane. When we dispose of wasted food in a landfill and it gets covered up with dirt and other waste, it creates an anaerobic environment. Microbes that thrive in that environment break down the organic material and release methane to the atmosphere. So, if we can divert organic waste and food waste from landfills and put it to productive use, we avoid that methane being released to the atmosphere. Another way I want people to think about food waste releasing greenhouse gases or being related to climate change is thinking about it from a food systems perspective. Because the other thing we need to keep in mind is that it takes a lot of resources, and effort, and investment, frankly, to get food from the farm to your table. So, if we think about growing a tomato, for example, we need to put fertilizer into the soil, which requires a lot of energy to create that fertilizer. We need to run tractors over the field. We need to harvest. We need to store the crop. We need to refrigerate the crop, and we need to transport that crop. All of those steps of the food supply chain require energy inputs. If we are using fossil fuels, that is leading to carbon dioxide emissions as well.   Norbert: So this is a really big issue. It seems like it's what happens once the food is in the landfill, but there are all these other places where there can be climate challenges throughout the supply chain. So this is a critical point: to not only think about the end, but also all along the supply chain. Is that a fair assessment?   Ned: That is exactly right. I think that is the piece that really makes food waste such a challenging issue. There are so many pieces to the puzzle. Food losses and food waste can occur anywhere across the food supply chain. It's not just with the consumer. We have losses in the field, we have losses at distribution, we have losses in storage. So just as there are resource inputs at every step of the food supply chain, there are also losses at every step. And so when we think about solutions, there is not going to be just one single solution. We have to think about many different solutions and the role of many different stakeholders as we bring food from farm to table.   Brenna: Thomas, if we can take a moment and turn to you, how can we turn food waste into something of economic value? And, how does that transformation help mitigate climate change?   Thomas: I'm glad you asked about economic value, because to really facilitate change in this area and valorize food waste, we really have to think about how to make that economically viable. That's ultimately what's going to drive sustainable change. We've done a lot of work in food waste at different scales. I would say the number one thing we need to do to convert that waste into something of economic value is to understand the nature of the waste itself. For example, we need to know how much is generated and where is it generated. Is it generated in large quantities in a few locations? Or, as is the case in household food waste, it's generated in relatively small quantities at millions and millions of different locations. Is it generated at a constant rate throughout course of the year, or is it more seasonal? Ned mentioned crop born food waste. Well, that's going to really occur at a more seasonal rate than, say, household food waste which is generated more uniformly over the course of the year. And we also have to know what are its characteristics. Food waste that is generated in, say, a food processing plant tends to be rather homogeneous, and that material will have a larger number of potential valorization options. Conversely, food that's generated in, say, a university cafeteria is by nature heterogeneous. So it's going to be more difficult to define viable valorization pathways for that kind of material. And how all these valorization options can help mitigate climate change is number one - keeping that material out of the landfill so it can't generate methane - but then also by mitigating or offsetting other sources of greenhouse gas emissions. For example, if we take food waste that's currently going to the landfill and divert that to an anaerobic digester, now we're using that material to generate a gas that can offset fossil natural gas use. So we're combining the benefit of methane reduction, but also generating bio-based gas that can offset fossil natural gas. So combining all these different benefits can enhance the economic viability of the overall system and help us mitigate climate change.   Brenna: Those are really helpful examples, and just good illustrations to help you think about the different ways we need to think about food waste. I thought about when I was doing food waste research in university cafeterias, and it is very heterogeneous. Although I will say there was an absurd quantity of ketchup, from what I remember while physically sorting the waste. I was just going to bring that up. I really appreciate the illustrations. Those are very helpful, different ways to think about it.   Norbert: I'm interested, are there other kinds of products that you can make out of wasted food?   Thomas: Oh yes, and this is where we spend a lot of our focus - looking at different options for converting food waste into different products. Of course, if food waste can't be used to feed human beings, which should always be our first objective, there's certainly animal feed. But we've done some research looking at the example of university cafeterias. We've found that the mixed food waste from our cafeteria to RIT, based on its characteristics, is actually well suited as fish feed, if you go and look at the specs on typical commercial fish food. Beyond that, of course, we often think about composting. And composting is a great option, because we're taking the inherent nutrients in the food waste and returning those to the soil, and that's going to help facilitate the next generation of food products. The challenge with some of these options, and compost in particular, is that you have to look at the entire supply chain. If you're generating lots of food waste in the middle of an urban center, do you really have an outlet for compost? Is there really a market for the compost? Certainly if you're in more of a rural area closer to the center of food production, there will be an obvious outlet for your compost. But in an urban setting, that may not be the case. Other products that can be generated from food waste, certainly energy is a big one. There's lots of interest now, and this is an area where Ned and I are collaborating on anaerobic digestion. So we can take the food waste and, by the same biological process in the landfill, generate methane gas, which can be used to offset fossil natural gas and other fossil fuels. We can also use that material in fermentation processes to make, say, ethanol or butanol for vehicle fuel, or even organic alcohols that have many many industrial applications. Beyond the animal feed, compost, and energy options, another area where we're really focusing our research is biochar. So if we take this organic food waste material and process it at high temperature, in the absence of oxygen, we're creating a very stable carbonaceous material we call biochar. The interesting aspect of that material is it effectively sequesters carbon for very long time periods, hundreds or even thousands of years. So now when we use that material in manufactured products, such as, say, concrete, now we're converting that food waste into a material that can sequester carbon for long periods of time. And, offset other materials like fly ash, let's say, used in conventional manufacturing processes. So again, I would just emphasize that to look at different options for valorization in different products, you really have to understand that complete supply chain, and understand your markets. Because that is going to really dictate the scale that you need to work to utilize that food waste material.   Norbert: Ah, that's really fascinating. Thank you for sharing those options.   Brenna: So Ned, Tom hit on some of the technologies, in terms of aerobic and anaerobic digestion, and then this cool new biochar, which I was not as familiar with. But can you add on a little bit where we are, in terms of technology to convert wasted food into economically viable products?   Ned: There's a lot of great examples of some smaller pilot projects and people exploring different options, which is fantastic. But if you think about it in terms of utilizing this technology and society at scale, we still have a ways to go to really make holistic change in how we think about food waste and how we treat it. There are roles here for policy. Here in California, we've put in an aggressive policy: Senate Bill 1383. And the goal of this larger bill is to reduce short-lived climate pollutants. But one of the short-lived climate pollutants is methane. And we actually are specifically targeting organic waste here in California, and we're trying to divert 75% of organic waste that previously went to landfill to more productive uses. 75% by 2025, which is a very ambitious goal. So that means that we have to start getting these technologies deployed rather quickly. We would be using a lot of composting, a lot of anaerobic digestion, and we'd need to build out that infrastructure to really handle 75% diversion. We also included a component that we want to recover 20% of edible food that's currently going to landfill. And so I think this is an important way to think about food systems, again, when we think about food waste, is that we're not just trying to deal with this as a waste product, but can we think about it still as food? When we say wasted food, it doesn't mean that it's not edible anymore. In fact, a lot of this wasted food is perfectly edible. So let's think about ways we can keep as much food as possible in the food system before we rely on some of these technologies that treat it more as a waste. If we sort of zoom out, I do want to think about it sort of at that scale. What's the role of policy, how do we spur investment in a lot of these technologies that Tom mentioned, and how do we really make change at significant scale?   The other way I want to think about the technologies is that many of these are well known. Some of them are pretty well known, but not yet widely adopted, and some are really emerging. Tom mentioned two probably of the most well-known pathways, which is animal feed and composting. Two things that we've been doing for as long as people have been eating food: we have been diverting some of our leftover food to animals, and we've also been returning it back to the soil as compost. So certainly there's more opportunity to divert food from landfill to those two pathways. Anerobic digestion that Tom mentioned has been known for quite some time in Europe. It's widely used. Here in the US, we're a few years behind, but we are looking to expand the use of anerobic digestion. And, there's a lot more investment in that space. An interesting question for anaerobic digestion, this is one of the research topics I work on, is what is the right scale of anaerobic digestion? Is it better to have large centralized facilities that we transport waste to over longer distances, but we get the economy of scale of a large treatment facility? Or is it better to have distributed small scale anerobic digestion? Where we can bring the food waste, it doesn't have to travel as far, there's a lot of food waste in urban areas. Perhaps we can embed some of that treatment directly in the urban landscape to reduce the transport of this material over great distances. One other known but not widely adopted technology is upcycling. So this is getting back to the using edible food. So, a juicing company. And they're taking all these great fresh fruits and vegetables, and juice is coming out of one side of the juice press, but a lot of this great nutritious fiber material is coming out the other side of the juice press. And we can actually use that; We can incorporate that into products. Another example is making beer. We have a lot of great grain material left over after the fermenting process for beer. So there's companies out there that are using these byproducts and actually returning it directly into the food system, as chips, as granola bars, you name it. There's a lot of excitement in this area. It's been identified as a growing food trend the last few years, and we're starting to see a lot more of these products actually on the retail shelves.   One more pathway, which is really some truly emerging technologies that are focused more on extraction, so looking again at byproducts and trying to extract high value products. These can be things like antioxidants, or nutritional supplements, things like oligosaccharides, which are known as a prebiotic. So the food to feed your probiotics in your gut to ensure a healthy micro flora in your gut. All of these things can be extracted from different food byproducts. One example we're working on here is extracting both of those things, antioxidants and oligosaccharides, from grape pomace. So whenever you're making wine, you're expressing the sugars and liquid out of the grapes to convert into wine, but you have a lot of the leftover skins and seeds, known as grape pomace, and we're working on ways to valorize that material.   Brenna: Thanks for sharing all of those pathways, Ned. California is typically ahead in terms of policy, so I really appreciate you sharing what you all are doing on the West Coast. A note on the upcycled food, I do think that's a really interesting pathway, and I study a lot on consumer food labels, and so I know there are increasing studies trying to understand what consumers might be willing to pay for foods labeled as upcycled. But I've also seen, I believe it's a yogurt brand. They have a label that, I think says it's certified rescue fruit, certified rescued food maybe. So I think that's kind of been an interesting development that we see in the retail setting.   Ned: Yeah, and I think we'll see more of that as time goes on. There's a lot of creativity, and we even did an upcycled project with our students, and I've never really seen their eyes light up and get so excited about this, because they love to make new food products, and that's always exciting. But this little extra piece of having this sustainability component and this extra challenge of working with something that hasn't been traditionally seen as an ingredient really got them so excited. And it really caught on here on campus. In fact, we've been running sort of a challenge every year on upcycled food products. I think the last three of five business competitions we've had at the business school here on campus have been people presenting upcycled food products. So it's not just the sustainability component. There's a great story behind it that I think really catches people's imagination.   Brenna: Super interesting. I would love to connect more on teaching notes.   Norbert: That is wonderful. Both you, Ned, and you, Tom, have talked about new products and new ways of doing this, but there's an important issue. And Ned, I remember you mentioned this particularly, that there's an infrastructure concern here. And so my question to both of you is what kinds of infrastructure would need to be in place to make food waste streams economically viable for commercial product manufacturing?   Ned: That's a great question, and I think I might just take the opportunity to zoom out again to think of this at a high level. There's lots of different particular infrastructures for the technology we talked about, but if we think about it in terms of domains, I would say we need the physical infrastructure. And by that I mean composting facilities, anaerobic digestion, even labs to think about some of these emerging technologies, opportunities for extraction and upcycling, et cetera. But we also really need that informational infrastructure that Tom was talking about at the beginning of the hour here. We just don't have a great picture of where the waste is, and what the waste is, and how much, and when. And all of that information is going to really allow us to have better opportunities to come up with viable decisions about what to do with this material. So that's part of the focus of the project Tom and I are working on, is not just looking at the technologies, but thinking about how we can improve access to information and the information we need to really open up opportunities for others. Because there might be great ideas out there, but people might not be able to estimate how much they can scale that idea. How much tomato pomace is there if I have a solution for tomato pomace? And when is it available? How far would I have to travel to go get that material, and at what cost? We just don't have that information. So I think really coming up with a database that starts to track this information would be incredibly helpful. We still suffer from the out of sight out of mind when we think about waste. You know, we think about the primary products, and we're very good at measuring those things. But as soon as we don't see value in a material, we don't tend to track it. So that's a place I think we need just as much investment in thinking, is that informational infrastructure as well as the physical infrastructure.   Thomas: I would add a couple of thoughts, and Ned had touched on these earlier. One is just thinking about the scale of some of these systems. Traditionally, as engineers, we always learned about scale up. Everything has to be bigger. If you want to get your unit cost down, it's got to be bigger, bigger, bigger all the time. However, we're now looking at a scenario where maybe things at, say, a community scale make more sense for a variety of reasons. One is, at a community scale, the people that actually generate the waste can benefit from its valorization. Let's say for example, we can develop anaerobic digestion systems that are suitable for, say, a neighborhood of 25 or 50 homes, or a large apartment complex. Now the residents who are generating food waste that can be converted into methane can now actually benefit from that material, maybe offset their own energy usage. The other advantage of doing things at smaller scale is you can more reasonably valorize multiple co-products. For the biochar example I mentioned earlier, that's a pyrolysis system that makes the biochar, and that operates at high temperature. Well, that's an exothermic reaction. So if we were making biochar at a community scale, you could also use that waste heat to heat the homes. So if we can start looking at community scale deployments that can valorize multiple co-products, I think we can move a lot of these technologies forward and also eliminate some of those transportation impacts that are really running counter to some of the benefits. If we're transporting food waste a hundred miles, we're generating a lot of greenhouse gases to do that, and we're eliminating some of the benefits that we're trying to realize in the first place. The other infrastructure need that I did mention early on, we need to figure out the logistics. The technologies that are out there for converting food waste into useful products, they're generally pretty well known, been done for hundreds of years. The real challenge is how do we collect, and pre-process, and move around all of this food waste that, again, at the household scale, is generated in fairly small quantities, but at many, many, many individual locations. So how do we develop the systems to economically and sustainably collect that material and make it available for upcycling and to value added products?   Norbert: Thank you, Tom. It sounds like what you're suggesting is this idea of having to rethink the way our food system works, both in terms of how we've thought about waste, but also thinking about waste as something local, which is an interesting idea that I think coincides with people's interests in local foods, that there are ways of capturing the cost of that, but also capturing the benefits. And Ned, I really appreciate your comment about not only just physical infrastructure, but information. Creating new databases, new ways of sharing what is actually being developed in terms of food waste, and making sure that that's available to the people who can actually use that.   Bio   Thomas Trabold teaches courses in the fundamentals of sustainability science, sustainable energy systems, sustainable mobility systems, and green chemistry. His primary research focus is in the development of alternative energy technologies including fuel cells, bio-fuels, and waste-to-energy processes. In 2014 and 2015 he was nominated for the Richard and Virginia Eisenhart Provost's Award for Excellence in Teaching, and in 2007 he earned the General Motors McCuen Award for “Neutron Imaging Facility and Methods for Fuel Cell Water Visualization.” His students say he has a system-level perspective informed by fundamental understanding and experiential knowledge. When Dr. Trabold isn't in the lab or classroom, he enjoys soccer, basketball, trail hiking, biking, and gardening.   Ned Spang's research focuses on characterizing and optimizing the efficiency of linked water, energy, and food resource systems. He is particularly interested in applying methods for measuring and monitoring these systems and their interrelationships in high-resolution and across multiple scales, both geographic and temporal. He further seeks to understand the influence of external markets, technological innovation, and policies on this integrated food-water-energy nexus. His recent publications explore the linked relationship between water and energy resource systems, the drivers and environmental impacts of on-farm food losses, and an in-depth review of the academic literature on food loss and waste. 

When you hear the words food waste do you think about forgotten leftovers? In the journey from farm to stores to the dinner table, some food is lost during the processing and transportation and at home some purchase food simply goes uneaten. How can transportation science help reduce food waste and loss and make the food system more resilient and climate friendly? Interview Summary   Norbert: Welcome Callie and Celeste, it is a real pleasure to have you. Both Brenna and I are agricultural economists. You folks are engineers. So we are curious how did you come be working on food waste and loss? Callie, let's start with you first.   Callie: Thanks Norbert, and thanks so much for having me. I've been really fascinated by waste in general for a long time. Like what makes certain products and certain things valuable to people so that they'll hang onto them and what makes us throw away other things. And for a long time I was studying sort of high tech waste like electronic waste, used lithium ion batteries, old solar panels or even plastics packaging. One of the things that I learned from that is that there's so much resources and there's so much value still contained in the things that we traditionally think of as waste. Whether it's gold in the circuit boards of those old cell phones or it's the chemical energy that can be converted into fuel energy contained in the carbon bonds of plastics. But, one of the challenges that I discovered in working with these different systems is that people don't really connect to them very immediately or very viscerally. When we discard something like a phone it sort of goes away and we don't really see what happens. However, I discovered that when people think about food, it's extremely visceral. That was spinach that you bought at the grocery store with the best intention of eating, and it sort of hurts when you throw it away. It hurts your pocketbook as well as it makes you feel really guilty. So I got into food waste hoping to bring this perspective of value recovery and value retention to the food system. But, doing so in such a way that really connects to people. So looking for technologies and user-friendly solutions where we can first of all try to keep food from being discarded. But then if it is inevitably discarded how can we use best engineering and technology practices to actually recover the energy, the water, the nutrients that are contained inside instead of sending those to landfill.   Norbert: You really are playing off the old idea of one man's or one person's trash is another person's treasures. I appreciate that. And you're right, food does have this deep connection to us from a lot of different perspectives we don't like and we have been taught over and over again not to waste food. So I do appreciate how you were able to take what you've learned in other spaces to the food space. So thank you for coming into this conversation. I'd like to turn this over to Celeste. Your work began in areas around food access and now exploring food waste and loss. What interests you about this societal challenge?   Celeste: So I really fell into the field of food waste. As you know, my background is in transportation and I've always been really interested in the societal impacts of transportation. A lot of my work focuses on equity and accessibility metrics related to transportation. I was working in the food access space before coming into food waste. I kind of first got interested in food access actually from a student of mine who for their senior project wanted to know which food insecurity or food desert metrics should they be looking at for their senior project. We started looking at how different parts of Baltimore indicated different areas of food insecurity. So that's really how I got interested into food. What has been the most interesting about food waste is that transportation is important to all aspects of the food supply chain and just the scale of the problems can be so different. We can think on a worldwide scale, a national scale regional and household level. For me household level has always been I think the most interesting when it comes to food waste questions. I've always been very interested in choice in how people make choices whether it be transportation or food purchasing habits and also how those two work together.   Norbert: Thank you Celeste for that. And I would say the first time I thought about transportation and wasted food or food loss was the challenge that food manufacturers have once a product, especially something like a fresh vegetable or fruit, leaves the farm. If it starts to go bad what are some alternatives to manage that potential loss as the product that's being transported from the farm to the packing house and from the packing house to a food manufacturer or retailer. And that there are real challenges of actually redirecting product once it leaves the farm. It's really exciting to hear how you think about that. Not from the farm gate necessarily but also to the final consumer. So thank you for the work that you're doing.   Brenna: Celeste, if we can continue with you the work you have done focuses a lot on transportation and waste management. Can you tell us more about how your research has informed the ways that we need to think differently about wasted food as a household or a farming problem?   Celeste: Sure, I'll speak about it mostly from the household level. One of the things that first came out of my previous work is that everybody values having choice and agency in their food purchasing. I don't think that we often model those choices when we're doing transportation modeling for example. I think that's still important when it comes to food waste. In my previous work I talked with a lot of people during my focus groups about how they're making the decision of what stores to go to, how often and why. What we found were that households were balancing tough decisions when it comes to limited budget, quality of food not being equal everywhere, which really gets at some of the supply chain issues and making difficult trade offs between how often to shop versus how much they're able to purchase. I think some of those lessons learned translate to food waste particularly when we talk about rescuing food how we go about rescuing food for example do we just provide boxes where people don't have a say in what those boxes are? Are we matching wasted food to the demand and the needs of people? So I think a lot of the lessons learned can translate well into the food waste space as well.   Brenna: I really appreciate those perspectives, Celeste. And appreciate that agency discussion as well. Norbert and I actually have a recently published paper on the tradeoffs households make between the frequency of grocery shopping and the food waste that they incur. People definitely have pretty strong preferences for the amount of transportation they may put in going to and from the store in a given time period. Callie, shifting to you is there anything you want to add related to this topic?   Callie: One of the things that Celeste pointed to is the complexity of this challenge. While we may see quite a large percentage of food waste happening at the household level, that waste is really magnified once we look all the way up the supply chain. And transportation plays a key role at every step of the process. Not only in the transportation of food to the downstream markets, but then the collection the transportation, the aggregation, and all of the choices that then these stakeholders make at a broader scale. So say a grocery store or a restaurant decides to engage in food waste diversion and recycling behavior then the transportation becomes a key part of that. Food is heavy, wet and kind of stinky. So it's a little bit of a unique challenge for transportation in that we both want to pick it up and transport it regularly to a place where it can be recycled but that transportation can be really expensive. So this is another challenge where it speaks to these broader questions about infrastructure because then you have to start deciding where can I put locations to site recycling food waste to energy locations? How do I actually collect the food waste from what places am I going around in my truck and picking it up? Where do I take it and then how do I use the products that come out of that? Because once you have taken food waste and say you've put it through a composting process, and you have the solid compost that comes out. Or perhaps you put it in an anaerobic digester and you have bioenergy in the form of natural gas or electricity that comes out, all of those products then have to be transported back to places where they can be used. So transportation really does infuse the entire system even if sometimes it means we're transporting things other than food itself.   Brenna: That's a really important point and it does add up in between each stages of supply chain and then sometimes back again, once we have these new products and then transforming them and moving them back to where they can be used again. Celeste, if we can continue with you, what are some of the transportation challenges that contribute to wasted food?   Celeste: One of the things we deal with in transportation is just it's a uncertain science, there's always some built in uncertainty with transportation and when we're talking about items that are perishable like fresh food, that is what results in a lot of food waste because they are buffering for that uncertainty and travel time. One of the big challenges is how do we reduce uncertainty and have more reliability in our transportation system? That's becoming more challenging as land use changes. We're seeing farming being more consolidated food is being produced further from where people live as well as just our cities were decentralizing which makes transportation even more difficult. Some of the biggest challenges related to transportation really linked to changes in land use patterns as well as the production of food and how we can kind of bridge those gaps together with transportation. In the near term rising gas prices is definitely a challenge and it'll be interesting to see what impact that has on the food supply chain and to customers as well.   Brenna: That is a really important point. I can imagine where some efforts maybe to recover and recycle foods may be stagnated if transportation costs are too high. Thank you so much for that perspective Celeste   Norbert: Hearing this conversation makes me think of something you said earlier, Callie. And it's this idea that previously you've worked on how to manage waste of science and technology products. There might be gold the circuit of a cell phone or something. But, when you talked about food waste you talked about heavy wet products and ultimately I thought of products that are of relative low value and given that there are rising costs in terms of transportation related to fuel costs how do we balance this? How do we get this relatively low value product on a per unit basis given that there is these high costs associated with transporting them? What do we need to make that equation work out?   Callie: That's a great question, Norbert. This is the perfect opportunity to bring in what we call life cycle thinking. So not just looking at the end of the pipe or at the last part of the problem when this waste is inevitably generated, even if we've put in place efforts to try to prevent or reduce it or divert it upstream, some waste will inevitably result. It's not just about the cost and benefits of that process of managing it but really thinking systemically over the whole supply chain. The food that we're talking about ultimately was produced in such a way that consumes significant amounts of energy, water, and nutrients. We pump a lot of electricity, a lot of fossil fuels, a lot of land, nitrogen, phosphorus and water into the production of food. So all of that is opportunity for us to recover that value at the end of life. The food itself contains much of those resources. It contains a significant amount of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. These are things that we might normally have to obtain from more environmentally intensive process if we're extracting them from nature transforming them into a form that we need for agriculture. And so then when we think about what would happen otherwise to the food if then we move downstream, if we aren't recovering the food at end of life or doing some other activity to reduce or donate surplus food before it becomes waste then we also have this huge cost of the landfill. Depending on where you live in the United States the cost of land filling products varies significantly. In some places it's pretty expensive and that's because landfill space is scarce. And it's also in recognition of the fact that there's a huge climate cost of landfilling, when the food enters a landfill environment where it's anaerobic or in other words oxygen free. It degrades in such a way to where methane is the primary product and if that methane is not captured at the landfill that has a climate impact 25 to 30 times more than carbon dioxide. So we can also think about attaching a cost or even a social cost of the carbon impacts that come from the landfill.   So when you look at this systemically you can think about food waste as a real value recovery and value retention process, in such a way that those costs associated with making it happen are worth it. When you look at the life cycle cost of the food system you can think about using this process to recover some of those initial embedded impacts and the initial embedded carbon, water and nutrients in the food as well as to prevent the downstream cost of unavoidable and unconstrained climate impacts from land filling food waste. But I would also say that for many companies and for many actors in this space they also see a value in food waste recovery. Many households are deciding to try composting for themselves or to work with a community compostor because they value the ability to produce that compost and use it in some way at home. Similarly, businesses are looking at some opportunities for food waste diversion that actually save them money. It may end up actually being cheaper to divert this material and use it in such a beneficial way to recover some value from it than to pay to have it hauled to this landfill instead.   One of the really cool areas that we're looking at is one in which we can think about decentralized solutions in parallel with centralized solutions. Our conventional waste management model has been to collect material within a relatively constrained area and then haul it to some location where it can be processed or landfilled afterwards. There are all kinds of new food waste recovery technologies that are emerging where they can actually be put in place at the point where the food waste is being generated. So this might be a small-scale digester, dehydrator or compostor being embedded right there at the restaurant or at the point at which the waste is generated. Now those can be still very cost sensitive for some businesses but there's some cases when they actually make more sense economically than alternatives.   Norbert: Thank you so much for that. That really adds some clarity to this issue of how do we valorize food waste. And what I've heard from you is that one of the ways of thinking about this is it's the avoidance of the cost associated with processing or throwing away that food that there can be significant effects on society, on the climate by having this product go into a landfill. We can avoid some of that and we can actually capture some value that there are different actors along the supply chain or different supply chains that could benefit from this. So thank you for that, that's really helpful. Along this line I'm interested to hear your thoughts Callie on other ways to improve the transportation infrastructure or the management of food waste that can help us prevent this possible wasted food.   Callie: When we think about minimizing and managing wasted food we really want to take this full circular economy perspective. Circular economy focuses on recovering and retaining value from products rather than thinking about it as waste management. So it's a real change in paradigm first and foremost. And within this circular economy framework we might first be looking at minimizing waste like designing waste out of the system by some of the things that Celeste is shared about ensuring that we actually get food to people who are going to consume it in ways that they want to, in a way that works for their choices. Then, if there's some excess food or surplus food, food that's in the wrong place at the wrong time, then we can think about diverting that through rescue and recovery operations. Transportation clearly plays an important role there because again, you have that sort of narrow time window to get food from one point to another where it can be used effectively. Then finally, in terms of closing the resource loop by this valorization process there are a lot of open questions there that I don't think we completely have the answer to. This again speaks to the importance of a systems perspective. So first and foremost, determining what the optimal strategies are for collecting waste. If I'm a food waste collection business what company do I start with? Where do I pick up waste first? How do I optimize the training of the people who are employed and engaged in this activity? Because if food is not separated effectively at a source and contamination like plastic packaging or other materials in the food waste stream that can really throw a wrench downstream when we try to recycle it. So there's some questions there about optimal methods for separation, segregation and collection of the food waste. And, there's all these open questions about the siting and the scale of the technologies we would use to actually treat it.   I mentioned earlier this question between small scale decentralized and large scale centralized systems. Another thing to layer on that is then the optimization of the markets and the transportation and the siting of the product uses. So one of the most common and promising methods that we're looking out for food waste recycling from commercial not necessarily households but the upstream suppliers is anaerobic digestion. Because in this case we're taking that anaerobic environment with oxygen free environment where the food degrades into methane, methane's the primary constituent of the natural gas we use for heating and driving and other things in our energy system. We can certainly take that energy and put it back into use if the food waste recycling facility is located near a transmission grid or near a pipeline where the compressed natural gas can be injected. But on the flip side, there's other products that come out of that, like a liquid digestate stream, which has some of those nitrogen and phosphorous nutrients still there. Now this could be land applied on farm fields but it is also really expensive to collect this liquid, transport it and then apply it into different areas. You have to be cognizant of the ecological impacts of applying this to land, especially if you are near freshwater resources that may already be vulnerable to agricultural pollution. I don't know that there's really a clear pathway of a one size fits all recipe for setting out these food waste ecosystems. But, I think there are a lot of open questions about the best way to optimize this system in different regions and parts of the country because everywhere has different sort of local infrastructure, ecological resources and transportation available. That's one of the most exciting parts of researching this is, is trying to figure out the right solution at the right place.   Norbert: Wow, thank you for that. That's really helpful. I'm grateful in particular for this idea of reframing our thoughts about waste management and how to think about that differently changes the way we actually approach these issues. We're at the end of our time but I wanted to raise this question to Celeste because Callie I think you've addressed this to some degree, but feel free to jump in. How do we want to make sure we include the environmental impact in the work that we are doing in reframing waste management? Are there some important things that have been left out? Should we reconsider? I would love to hear your thoughts on this.   Celeste: When it comes to food waste, one of the things that really is important is that it is an interdisciplinary field. Often I find as we talk about the role of transportation in food waste is that everybody recognizes that it's an important component of food waste but often it's a separate conversation. So listening to Callie in particular, she highlighted the importance of making sure that transportation is being included kind of as a decision variable in our models. That transportation is not just an afterthought as one of the costs associated with transporting food. When we really embed transportation into the decisions that we are making related to food waste it naturally has a positive impact on the environment as well. One thing that I am curious about is the role of new transportation technologies in the future. Our field is evolving quite rapidly with autonomous and connected vehicles drone deliveries and things like that. In the future there will need to be research to look at what new technologies can do in the field of food waste.   Bios   Callie Babbitt is a Professor of Sustainability at Rochester Institute of Technology's Golisano Institute for Sustainability. Callie's research group aims to create circular economy solutions to recover value from waste streams - including food waste, consumer electronics, plastics, and lithium-ion batteries. Research at RIT is focused on creating innovative technologies, business models, policy initiatives, and consumer engagement efforts to reduce the amount and environmental impacts of food waste while at the same time creating economic growth and maximizing efficient use of resources.   Celeste Chavis is an associate professor in the Department of Transportation and Urban Infrastructure Studies at Morgan State University. Her research focuses on transportation operations, safety, and performance metrics for multimodal transportation systems through an equity lens. Her research focuses on accessibility measures (including food access), public transit operations, pedestrian and bicycle safety, and travel behavioral modeling. She is a registered professional engineer in Maryland.

Bob talked about Lee Zeldin, voting, the Golisano Institute, and a child with a gun at school.

By Samuel Greengard Communications of the ACM, Vol. 64 No. 12, Pages 23-25 10.1145/3490165 Modern life increasingly is defined by the activities we . Modern life increasingly is defined by the activities we engage in online: Zoom meetings at work, Netflix and Xbox marathons at home, and a steady stream of YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook video clips in the nooks and crannies in between. There are many benefits to life online, yet there are also undeniable social, economic, and environmental costs. While global emissions from video streaming and other digital activities comprise somewhere in the neighborhood of 3% of the total,a the voracious and growing appetite for bandwidth is raising concerns about sustainability—and prompting some to wonder whether it is possible to keep up with the demand. "We're seeing the digitization of everything—work, entertainment and shopping. There's a huge shift in lifestyle and it's sharpening the focus on how all of these devices impact things," says Eric Williams, a professor of sustainability at the Golisano Institute for Sustainability of the Rochester Institute of Technology. As bandwidth demand ticks upward and carries the demand for power with it, "There's an emerging discussion about the role of all the digital services we've come to rely on," says Mike Hazas, a professor in the Department of Information Technology at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. "It's an important discussion, because how we design and use systems will define our future." Back to Top Left to Our Devices There's a common assumption that life online is cleaner and greener than life in the physical realm. There is near-zero cost to sending an email message or viewing a YouTube video. While it is true a Zoom meeting consumes only a fraction of the energy of a commute to work or a flight across the country, it does require bandwidth and electricity. Of course, as millions of people venture online for billions of video calls, the energy and bandwidth requirements accumulate, and can spike. The ability to click and instantly watch videos—and even autoplay them in various apps—has changed behavior in profound ways. According to networking firm Sandvine, upwards of 60% of the traffic on the Internet is now related to consumer video streaming, and sites such as Netflix, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube carry the bulk of this traffic, which is growing at an annual clip of about 24%.b The Carbon Trust, an independent U.K.-based advisory organization comprised of experts in sustainability, reports that long-form video streaming accounts for 45% of all Internet traffic.c Artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, cryptocurrency mining, Blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are poised to ratchet up the stakes further. "These systems will add huge volumes of traffic to the Internet, and much of this traffic is automated and not constrained by users," says Kelly Widdicks, a post-doctoral researcher at the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University in the U.K. The direct use of devices, and how they draw power and bandwidth, is not the only factor in understanding how they impact things, however. About 90% of the energy a smartphone uses during its life cycle is embedded in the manufacturing process.d This includes collecting rare materials for batteries, fabricating devices, and recycling and disposing of components. What's more, after a smartphone handset is produced, about 90% of the energy consumption takes place off the phone, including on the network and in the datacenter.e Further complicating matters: fast, persistent Internet connections modify behavior. A 2021 study conducted by a pair of researchers at the U.K.'s University of Sussex, Bernado Calderola and Steve Sorrell, found that the availability of telework may actually encourage people to move farther from their place of work and engage in additional non-work-related travel. The authors noted that such "results provi...

Sometimes a graduate student's career path really stays with you, and that's the case with Carli Flynn, Ph.D. Carli and I worked together on two career trajectories--first, she was a postdoc at RIT in the Golisano Institute for Sustainability, before she shifted gears to become a consultant for McKinsey & Co. Listen as Carli tells us about her work, about adaptability, and about why being a graduate student in the sciences is really about entrepreneurship.

On this episode of the podcast we bring on Dr. Eric Williams from the Golisano Institute for Sustainability. Dr. Williams has had an amazing 20 year long career in sustainability research and his work has been cited in over 6,000 papers and he has also raised more than 4.9 million dollars in grant funding for sustainability research. In this episode we touch on a variety of different topics ranging from how his career pivoted from physics to sustainability, what happens to your Iphone after you are done with it, and what the future of United States energy grids could look like.

Born in Ghana and immigrated to Brooklyn, New York at the age of 15, Nana received both his Bachelor of Architecture and Master of Architectural and Design Urbanism degrees from the University of Notre Dame, where he currently also sits on a Diversity Advisory Task Force. Before going on to academia, Nana worked in private practice where he gained industry experience as a designer for several well-respected firms in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and NYC on a variety of high-profile international projects. After teaching at SUNY Delhi where he developed the first Study Abroad Program based on the History and Architecture of the Italian Renaissance, Nana joined Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in 2015 as an Assistant Professor in the Master of Architecture program in the Golisano Institute for Sustainability (GIS). His research interests include traditional architecture, urban planning, and the design of good public spaces. Nana sheds light on many things anyone interested in studying architecture should know, including: 1. You don't need to know how to draw in order to become an architect as you'll be taught how to draw in school. 2. The difference between classical and contemporary architectural studies as well as the pros and cons to both 3. Licensing and reciprocity differences between 4-year and 5-year architecture programs 4. Architecture is not a job; it’s a profession. You never stop sketching as an architect and are always working on your craft. In other words, no summers off. 5. What architects can expect working at smaller firms vs larger firms and industry vs academia Connect with Nana! Email: naagis@rit.edu  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nandoh23/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Professor_Andoh ----- Stay connected with Journey to Jupiter! Website: www.jetaundavis.com Instagram: @JourneyJupiter Twitter: @JourneyJupiter Facebook: @JourneyJupiter ----- Produced by Ken Inge of Dead End Hip Hop

Growing up in India Shahana Althaf thought earning a doctorate was a distant dream. But, despite potential roadblocks, she persevered and she will receive her Ph.D. from RIT’s Golisano Institute for Sustainability on May 10. In this episode of Intersections she talks with associate professor Callie Babbitt about how she overcame cultural pressures and the challenges of balancing home life with a young child to fulfill her dreams and earn her degree. Read a transcript of this podcast: https://www.rit.edu/ritnews/pdfs/Graduation-Podcast-Transcript.pdf

Remanufacturing allows us to use product components again at high quality while reducing energy demand by – in some cases – 80%. Given the material constraints we face, why this is not happening at a wider scale? In this episode, Nabil Nasr puts forward what he sees as the issues holding back remanufacturing. Nabil Nasr is Associate Provost for Academic Affairs and Director of the Golisano Institute for Sustainability at Rochester Institute of Technology; he is also founder of the Centre for Remanufacturing and Resource Recovery.

Remanufacturing allows us to use product components again at high quality while reducing energy demand by - in some cases - 80%. Given the material constraints we face, why this is not happening at a wider scale? In this episode, Nabil Nasr puts forward what he sees as the issues holding back remanufacturing.  Nabil Nasr is Associate Provost for Academic Affairs and Director of the Golisano Institute for Sustainability at Rochester Institute of Technology; he is also founder of the Centre for Remanufacturing and Resource Recovery. This podcast series presented by Colin Webster explores the recently published book A New Dynamic 2: Effective systems in a circular economy. Each programme features an interview with authors of the book’s chapters. These leading experts on architecture, agriculture, design, business or engineering, provide unique insights that reflect on the necessity to develop a whole-system approach to re-think our economy.  

Increasingly, remanufacturing operations hold significant roles in sustainability initiatives.  Listen in as two leading voices in remanufacturing,  John Disharoon, Director of Market Access for Caterpillar’s Cat Reman and Dr. Nabil Nasr, Associate Provost for Academic Affairs and Director of The Golisano Institute for Sustainability, discuss remanufacturing’s role in the circular economy with co-hosts Tim Grady and Lew Weiss.  Get up to speed on the intricate elements and challenges of the remanufacturing process today, and hear all about the R&D for tomorrow that will insure manufacturers keep non-renewable resources in circulation and costs down long after the original product would have hit the landfill.