BE: MUSES/Materials Flow Modeling in Sustainable Industrial Systems Within Urban Centers

“BE：城市中心可持续工业系统的材料流建模”是一项跨学科的“概念验证”工作，它将工程和规划的独立模型联系起来并整合在一起，以测试区域位置对工业生态至关重要的整体假设。研究人员试图解决由于将可持续工业系统与可持续城市系统分开对待而导致的可持续性思维的重大差距。在这一差距缩小之前，减轻工业对环境影响的努力不可能完全实现。该研究将评估从物料流和城市系统模型中创建混合模型的潜力，以研究区域位置对工业生态的影响。在此过程中，它将在化学工程、机械工程、城市和区域规划等领域的研究人员之间建立智力伙伴关系。该模型的开发将以亚特兰大都市地区的计算机回收和再制造为基础。工程一直在朝着可持续的工业系统努力，城市和区域规划一直在朝着可持续的城市系统努力。这项规划拨款将直接影响社会，因为它表明工程和区域规划不仅可以共同努力，将可持续工业和城市系统的目标结合起来，而且必须这样做，才能实现比任何一个学科单独实现的更大的可持续发展条件。对城市中心的物料流动进行准确的建模，将有助于开发基于市场的收集、回收和再制造系统，并确保将绿地消耗产生的影响与需要经济振兴的城市地区产生的影响进行比较。

"BE:MUSES / Modeling Materials Flows for Sustainable Industrial Systems in Urban Centers" is an interdisciplinary "proof of concept" effort that links and integrates separate models from engineering and planning to test the overall hypothesis that regional location matters for industrial ecology. The researchers seek to address the significant gap in thinking on sustainability that has resulted from treating sustainable industrial systems separately from sustainable urban systems. Efforts to mitigate the environmental impacts of industry cannot be fully realized until this gap is closed. The research will evaluate the potential to create hybrid models from materials flow and urban systems models for examining the impact of regional location on industrial ecology. In so doing, it will build an intellectual partnership between researchers in the fields of chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, and city and regional planning. The model development will be built on a case of computer recycling and remanufacturing for the Atlanta metropolitan region. Engineering has been working towards sustainable industrial systems, and city and regional planning has been working towards sustainable urban systems. This planning grant will directly impact society by demonstrating that engineering and regional planning not only can work together to marry the goals of sustainable industrial and urban systems, but must do so to realize greater achievement of the conditions of sustainability than either discipline could achieve independently. Accurate modeling of materials flows for urban centers will contribute to the ability to develop market-based collection, recycling, and remanufacturing systems and to ensure that the impacts stemming from the consumption of greenfields are compared to those generated in urban areas in need of economic revitalization.