School Notes: School of the Environment
January/February 2007

Green scientists join Yale faculty

Julie Zimmerman, an author of a treatise on the principles of green engineering, and Paul Anastas, the "father of green chemistry," have joined the Yale University faculty. With these appointments, says Thomas Graedel, the Clifton R. Musser Professor of Industrial Ecology, "Yale builds on its already world-class stature in industrial ecology and sustainability."

Zimmerman developed novel environmentally friendly metalworking solvents for optimizing manufacturing machining processes without sacrificing performance; her results are currently being implemented by the auto industry. At the EPA Zimmerman managed grants to academia and small businesses in the areas of pollution prevention and sustainability. She obtained a PhD from the University of Michigan in 2003, and holds a joint Yale faculty appointment with the Department of Environmental Engineering and the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.

Anastas was the 2006 winner of the $250,000 Heinz Prize for the Environment from the Heinz Family Philanthropies, which hailed him as the "father of green chemistry." He is director of the Green Chemistry Institute, and served from 1999 to 2004 in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Prior to that he was chief of the industrial chemistry branch of the EPA, where he was responsible for the regulatory review of industrial chemicals and the development of rules, policy, and guidance. He holds a PhD in organic chemistry from Brandeis University.

Developing world gains access to environmental research

A collaborative project among Yale University, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and leading science and technology publishers will make global scientific research in the environmental sciences available online to environmental scientists, researchers, and policymakers in the developing world.

Through Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE), more than 200 publishers, societies, and associations will offer one of the world's largest collections of scholarly, peer-reviewed environmental science journals to more than 1,200 public and nonprofit environmental institutions in 106 developing nations in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe. Every institution enrolled in OARE will receive resources with an annual retail subscription valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Institutions eligible to enroll in OARE include universities and colleges, research institutes, ministries of the environment and other government agencies, libraries, and national nongovernmental organizations. Access for institutions in the 70 poorest countries will be free. Access for institutions in 38 lower-middle-income countries will be for a nominal charge; monies raised will be reinvested to support continued training and outreach activities in eligible countries.

More than 1,000 scholarly scientific and technical journal titles in the fields of environmental science will be provided through a portal presented in English, Spanish, and French. OARE will also provide important abstract and index research databases, which are intellectual tools the scientific and professional community use to search for information within thousands of scholarly publications.

Yale journal identifies products that cause greatest environmental damage

Transportation, food processing, and home energy use are the leading causes of environmental damage, according to a special issue of the Journal of Industrial Ecology. Automobiles and air transport, the meat and dairy industries, and home energy use, including the use of appliances, account for nearly 80 percent of the total amount of pollution produced by society. Contributors to the special issue, "Priorities for Environmental Product Policy," examined the impacts of products in Cardiff, Wales; in Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands; and in countries in the European Union as a whole. The special issue features the most recent and influential studies on the relative impact of consumption activities.

The Journal of Industrial Ecology is a peer-reviewed international quarterly owned by Yale University, published by MIT Press, and headquartered at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. The articles in the special issue are available at www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/jiec/10/3.