
Jenna JambeckUniversity of Georgia | UGA · College of Engineering
Jenna Jambeck
PhD in Environmental Engineering
About
51
Publications
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Introduction
Dr. Jambeck conducts research and teaches environmental engineering with a focus on solid waste. Her work often interweaves social context and sciences with technical aspects. As we evolve from waste management to materials management, a new paradigm is being created and the Jambeck Research Group strives to be at the forefront of this transformation.
Additional affiliations
January 2015 - present
August 2009 - December 2014
July 2005 - July 2009
Publications
Publications (51)
Plastic debris in the marine environment is widely documented, but the quantity of plastic entering the ocean from waste generated on land is unknown. By linking worldwide data on solid waste, population density, and economic status, we estimated the mass of land-based plastic waste entering the ocean. We calculate that 275 million metric tons (MT)...
A life cycle assessment (LCA) of various end-of-life management options for construction and demolition (C&D) debris was conducted using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Municipal Solid Waste Decision Support Tool. A comparative LCA evaluated seven different management scenarios using the annual production of C&D debris in New Hampshire a...
Microbial fuel cells were designed and operated to treat landfill leachate while simultaneously producing electricity. Two designs were tested in batch cycles using landfill leachate as a substrate without inoculation (908 to 3,200 mg/L chemical oxygen demand (COD)): Circle (934 mL) and large-scale microbial fuel cells (MFC) (18.3 L). A total of se...
The US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) launched the Resource Conservation Challenge (RCC) in 2002 to help reduce waste and move towards more sustainable resource consumption. The objective of the RCC is to help communities, industries, and the public think in terms of materials management rather than waste disposal. Reducing cost, finding...
Plastic waste is a significant environmental pollutant that is difficult to monitor. We created a system of neural networks to analyze spectral, spatial, and temporal components of Sentinel-2 satellite data to identify terrestrial aggregations of waste. The system works at wide geographic scale, finding waste sites in twelve countries across Southe...
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Plastic waste is a significant environmental pollutant that is difficult to monitor. We created a system of neural networks to analyze spectral, spatial, and temporal components of Sentinel-2 satellite data to identify terrestrial aggregations of waste. The system works at continental scale. We evaluated performance in Indonesia and detected 374 wa...
Marine litter, including plastics and microplastics, is accumulating in the world’s oceans at an unprecedented rate. The volume of plastics currently in the oceans has been estimated at between 75 million and 199 million tons1. Found in sea floor sediments and on beaches, among many other locations globally, plastics are are becoming part of the Ea...
The ocean is the ultimate sink for anthropogenic pollution. According to the HydroSHED model, over 80% of the land mass on Earth is in a watershed that drains directly to the ocean (Lehner and Grill 2013). Until recently, the ocean seemed to be endlessly able to absorb all the waste that human activity has discharged into it. The Ocean Health Index...
The rapid growth of the use and disposal of plastic materials has proved to be a challenge for solid waste management systems with impacts on our environment and ocean. While recycling and the circular economy have been touted as potential solutions, upward of half of the plastic waste intended for recycling has been exported to hundreds of countri...
Poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyhexanoate) (poly(3HB-co-3HHx)) thermoplastics are a promising biodegradable alternative to traditional plastics for many consumer applications. Biodegradation measured by gaseous carbon loss of several types of poly(3HB-co-3HHx) plastic were investigated under anaerobic conditions and aerobic seawater environments...
In recent years, there has been a tremendous increase in work that focuses on the amount and types of waste entering the marine environment from multiple geographies around the world. To date, however, there are few reports about the scale of waste entering the coastal and oceanic waters around Africa. To address this knowledge gap, existing inform...
Synthetic organic polymers-or plastics-did not enter widespread use until the 1950s. By 2015, global production had increased to 322 million metric tons (Mt) year⁻¹, which approaches the total weight of the human population produced in plastic every year. Approximately half is used for packaging and other disposables, 40% of plastic waste is not ac...
Plastics have outgrown most man-made materials and have long been under environmental scrutiny. However, robust global information, particularly about their end-of-life fate, is lacking. By identifying and synthesizing dispersed data on production, use, and end-of-life management of polymer resins, synthetic fibers, and additives, we present the fi...
Recycling rates have plateaued and recycling in public spaces has been targeted as a component that can help increase overall recycling rates. Eco-feedback technology and environmental psychology were combined to study recycling in a semi-public space in multiple social environments. A low-cost, low-energy electronic recycling bin design (WeRecycle...
Marine debris and plastic in our oceans is a global issue of increasing concern. However, the monitoring of litter and debris is challenging at the global scale because of disconnected local organizations and the use of paper and pen for documentation. The Marine Debris Tracker mobile app and citizen science program allow for the collection of glob...
Floating and stranded marine debris is widespread. Increasing sea-levels and altered rainfall, solar-radiation, wind-speed, waves and oceanic currents associated with climatic change, are likely to transfer more debris from coastal cities into marine and coastal habitats. Marine debris causes economic and ecological impacts, but understanding the s...
The Sustainable Neighborhoods for Happiness Index (SNHI) is a tool to assess and compare how well individual cities, towns, neighborhoods and communities embrace sustainable practices and how these practices translate to opportunities for residents to pursue happiness. Recent studies have shown that the majority of humanity is concentrated in coast...
This paper describes the development of the Sustainable Neighborhoods for Happiness Index (SNHI): a tool to assess and compare how well individual cities, towns, neighborhoods and communities embrace sustainable practices and how these practices translate to opportunities for residents to pursue happiness. The SNHI is grounded in findings from prim...
In this paper, we assess the associations between self-reported happiness, measured using the Gallup Healthways Well-Being Index (2012), and four US city sustainability indices: the Green City Index (2011), Our Green Cities (2012), Popular Science US City Rankings (2008) and the SustainLane US Green City Rankings (2007). Based on the examination of...
With the goal to move society toward less reliance on fossil fuels and the mitigation of climate change, there is increasing interest and investment in the bioenergy sector. However, current bioenergy growth patterns may, in the long term, only be met through an expansion of global arable land at the expense of natural ecosystems and in competition...
Wood PreservationHazardous PotentialCharacterization of PreservedWoodTreatment and DisposalReferences
Although phased out of many residential uses in the United States, the disposal of CCA-treated wood remains a concern because significant quantities have yet to be taken out of service, and it is commonly disposed in landfills. Catastrophic events have also led to the concentrated disposal of CCA-treated wood, often in unlined landfills. The goal o...
Misrepresentation of FDEP Groundwater DataSaxe et al. conveniently aggregate all of the groundwater monitoring data collected by the FDEP together. As a result of this aggregation the authors artificially increase the variability in the raw data set so that statistically the variations in the raw data set overwhelm any observable trends for individ...
Chromated copper arsenate (CCA)-treated wood is a preservative treated wood construction product that grew in use in the 1970s for both residential and industrial applications. Although some countries have banned the use of the product for some applications, others have not, and the product continues to enter the waste stream from construction, dem...
A recent focus of marine debris research is to identify and target pollution sources so that solutions to the problem can be developed through policy and education. This project hopes to expand upon this focus by also examining public attitudes toward marine debris and using this information with cleanup data to systematically implement and test co...
This Activity uses multi-colored breakfast cereal and liquid to model the concepts of leachate and leaching from municipal solid waste disposed of in a landfill. Students create a modern landfill model with the same materials. Keywords (Audience): General Public
The University of New Hampshire (UNH) in Durham collects food waste from the dining halls and several Durham businesses and composted at the UNH College of Life Sciences and Agriculture's Kingman Farm. The compost is sold locally and used by the UNH Organic Garden Club to grow vegetables in the campus organic gardens. These vegetables are then sold...
The proper end-of-life management of chromated copper arsenate (CCA)-treated wood, which contains arsenic, copper, and chromium, is a concern to the solid waste management community. Landfills are often the final repository of this waste stream, and the impacts of CCA preservative metals on leachate quality are not well understood. Monofills are a...
As exhibited by the international representation of the contributors to this book, environmental concerns posed by the use and disposal of preservative-treated wood are common throughout the world. Discarded preservative-treated wood ' either as remnants from new construction activities or spent wood removed at the end of its useful life ' should b...
Construction and demolition (C&D) debris comprises a significant portion of the solid waste stream in the United States. Because C&D debris is largely regulated at the state level, the requirements for C&D debris disposal facilities vary from state to state. A review of state regulations was conducted to determine C&D debris disposal facility requi...
Wood treated with chromated copper arsenate (CCA) is primarily disposed within construction and demolition (C&D) debris landfills, with wood monofills and municipal solid waste (MSW) landfills as alternative disposal options. This study evaluated the extent and speciation of arsenic leaching from landfills containing CCA-treated wood. In control ly...
The desire for less waste and more sustainable use of resources has resulted in the U.S. EPA's Resource Conservation Challenge. This initiative is directed towards helping the U.S. transition from waste disposal towards materials management. Understanding the potential environmental and economic tradeoffs requires the use of life-cycle analysis and...
A major product recovered from the processing and recycling of construction and demolition (C&D) debris is screened soil, also referred to as fines. A proposed reuse option for C&D debris fines is fill material, typically in construction projects as a substitute for natural soil. Waste material that is reused in a manner similar to soil must first...
Contamination of wood waste with chromated copper arsenate greatly limits recycling opportunities for the wood waste as a whole. Separation of CCA-treated wood from other wood types is one means by which such contamination can be removed. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate two detector technologies for sorting CCA-treated wood from ot...
Solid waste in the world's waters and solid waste that accumulates on the shorelines of waterways is known as marine debris. Marine debris has been recognized as a form of pollution for nearly 50 years and is a concern for the general public for aesthetic reasons and may also pose a human health and safety hazard. Marine debris can affect the touri...
There is an increasing need in the world today for alternative forms of energy production. This research utilized microbial fuel cell (MFC) technology to treat landfill leachate as well as produce energy. While the technology of MFCs is not new, recent developments have brought the technology to a more useful and practical level. MFCs are devices t...