Jeremy R Gregory

• PhD
• Managing Director at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Transport is the second-largest contributor to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Therefore, it is crucial to establish a benchmark for the carbon intensity of the road transportation sector. This assessment should encompass not only the impact of paving materials and road construction practice, but also consider the entire lifecycle of roads,...

Each year, state DOTs make decisions about which paving jobs to let, and whether they should be designed as concrete, asphalt, or let as alternates. There is wide variation in the amount spent on concrete pavement and asphalt pavement across the states and over time. Asphalt and concrete pavement materials can be considered substitutes because they...

There is a growing interest in developing cool pavement strategies to mitigate pavement’s impact on the global warming in recent years. One of the mitigation strategies is by increasing the solar reflectance (or albedo) of the pavement surface, which directly contributes to global cooling by adjusting radiative forcing and potentially reduces the e...

Departments of transportation (DOTs) are increasingly utilizing pavement management systems for the efficient maintenance and preservation of the existing roadway system. Few studies to date, however, have considered sources of variation beyond pavement deterioration nor the implication of investing in multiple pavement materials. The goal of this...

Significance Changes to concrete production as well as in building and pavements systems—the largest consumers of concrete—can lead to more than 50% reductions in associated GHG emissions by 2050. Over this period, the operational phase of newly constructed buildings and pavements still generates most GHG emissions unless the electrical grid, heati...

The European Union (EU-27) targets buildings' decarbonization by 2050, and prefabrication presents an opportunity to reduce buildings and construction sector impacts. A stock-based approach was developed to measure the influence of wide adoption of building prefabrication in the EU-27 building stock from 2020 to 2050. Impacts and costs of five typo...

The prediction of pavement deterioration is a key element for performance-based planning. One characteristic for the pavement management system data that are used for deterioration prediction is that they are in the time-series form. However, most existing models assume the pavement deterioration satisfies a Markovian assumption and ignores histori...

Performance-based planning is an important tool for allocating treatment resources across a pavement network. The process involves the selection of a treatment action for each segment in a pavement network from a set of candidate treatments and then optimizing the allocation of funds across the network in accordance with a budget constraint. This p...

A novel weighted multi-output neural network (NN) model is proposed for predicting the deterioration of rigid pavements based on Iowa pavement management system data. This first-of-a-kind model simultaneously predicts four pavement condition metrics concerning rigid pavements, including IRI, faulting, longitudinal crack and transverse crack. It pro...

The impacts of climate conditions, the geometry of concrete in use, and end-of-life and surface treatment actions have received little attention in previous studies of carbon uptake calculation. This work attempts to advance the knowledge of pavement carbon uptake based on a bottom-up approach and using state-level data to estimate the carbon uptak...

The comparability of environmental product declarations (EPDs) and the heterogeneity of their life cycle assessment (LCA) methods are considered the main challenges facing the credibility of results. In this study, a probabilistic tool was proposed and developed to gain insight into what is necessary to achieve the unrealized vision of comparable E...

A novel weighted multi-output neural network (NN) model is proposed for predicting the deterioration of rigid pavements based on Iowa pavement management system data. This first-of-a-kind model simultaneously predicts four pavement condition metrics concerning rigid pavements, including IRI, faulting, longitudinal crack and transverse crack. It pro...

Planning agencies are searching for innovative techniques to cost effectively preserve their existing infrastructure systems. In this study, we investigate the effects of two indicators of increased competition in the paving market as a mechanism to reduce roadway construction costs. The highway construction sector makes for a unique case study due...

Concrete is a critical component of deep decarbonization efforts because it impacts the building, transportation, and industrial sectors. We use a bottom-up model of current and future building and pavement stocks and construction in the US to contextualize the role of concrete in greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions strategies under projected and ambit...

Various methods have been proposed to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with transportation. We investigate the potential of increasing the elastic modulus of pavement surface layers across the entire US pavement network as a means of lowering vehicle excess fuel consumption (EFC) due to deflection-induced pavement-vehicle interactio...

This contribution details a high-resolution approach to estimate the net greenhouse gas (GHG) impact of changing pavement albedo in urban areas by accounting for both changes in air temperature and building energy demand (BED) caused by the albedo change. The approach uses machine-learning-based meta-models that allow stakeholders to estimate the i...

High-albedo materials reflect more solar radiation and, thereby, alter the earth’s radiative balance. Increasing pavement albedo, therefore, has been considered as a technological strategy to mitigate global warming. Previous studies have evaluated the general potential of increasing pavement albedo using global-average models. To factor this effec...

This paper proposes a new probabilistic treatment path dependence (PTPD) model for budget allocation within pavement network management problems. During the evaluation of treatment alternatives for a segment in a pavement network, the model considers benefits of both the evaluated treatment and its following actions. It also incorporates the influe...

Pavement-management systems are important tools that planning agencies depend on to cost-effectively maintain their roadway systems. The incorporation of uncertainty (beyond that related to pavement degradation) within these systems is limited, causing decision-makers to be unable to (a) recognize the risk of their status quo maintenance policy and...

In 2009, the U.S. cement and concrete industries established the Concrete Sustainability Hub at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A primary thrust of MIT’s activities has been improving the life cycle assessment practices to better quantify the environmental impacts over the life of a pavement. In their research, the MIT CSHub determined t...

In 2009, the United States cement and concrete industries established the Concrete Sustainability Hub at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop more sustainable and durable pavement infrastructure and buildings. With respect to pavements, two areas of focus have been on how the economic practices used in the pavement type selection pr...

Concrete is the most widely used engineered material in the world with more than 10 billion tons produced annually. Unfortunately, with that scale comes a significant burden in terms of energy, water, and release of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. As such, there is interest in creating concrete formulas that minimize this environmental burde...

While many pavement life cycle assessment (LCA) studies have been performed over the last decade, one of the most important advances and challenges is quantifying the impacts of various components during the use phase of pavements. The goal of this research is to understand the role of the use phase, particularly pavement-vehicle interaction (PVI),...

Life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA) is a way to evaluate the long-term cost effectiveness of different pavement designs or treatment actions. Owing to the existence of uncertainties, many probabilistic LCCA models have been proposed. They mainly use a prescribed treatment schedule or determine schedules by mechanistic-empirical analysis, potentially le...

Planning agencies increasingly use pavement management systems (PMS) to determine an optimal preservation strategy for their roadway assets. To develop cost-effective resource allocation policies, it is important that a PMS embed pavement degradation models that accurately depict its progression over time. Presently, PMS frameworks use two broad cl...

Two obstacles that impede wider use of life cycle assessment (LCA) are its time- and data-intensiveness and the credibility surrounding its results—challenges that grow with the complexity of the product being analyzed. To guide the critical early-design stages of a complicated product like a building, it is important to be able to rapidly estimate...

Albedo is the measure of the ratio of solar radiation reflected by the Earth’s surface. High-albedo reflective surfaces absorb less energy and reflect more shortwave radiation. The change in radiative energy balance at the top-of-atmosphere (TOA), which is called radiative forcing (RF), reduces nearby air temperatures and influences the surrounding...

To aid the design of buildings with lower environmental impacts, it is important to be able to rapidly compare the predicted impacts and costs of design alternatives at early stages of the design process when many influential decisions are made. At the same time, it is also important to preserve design flexibility in order to better accommodate div...

In 2009, the United States cement and concrete industries established the Concrete Sustainability Hub at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop more sustainable and durable pavement infrastructure and buildings. With respect to pavements, one area of focus has been on improving the economic procedures related to pavement type selectio...

Different models have been developed to quantify the energy dissipation in pavements due to pavement–vehicle interaction (PVI). The present study focuses on a mechanistic model for estimating deflection-induced excess fuel consumption (EFC). Due to the non-linearity of the models, the calculated dissipation is dependent on the resolution and accura...

The existence of uncertainties and variations in data represents a remaining challenge for life cycle assessment (LCA). Moreover, a full analysis may be complex, time-consuming, and implemented mainly when a product design is already defined. Structured under-specification, a method developed to streamline LCA, is here proposed to support the resid...

The International Energy Conservation Code (IECC), which is created by the International Code Council (ICC), standardizes expectations for the design and construction of buildings with regards to energy use and conservation over the structure’s lifetime. With every new release these codes get more stringent. The goal of this analysis was to quantif...

Life cycle thinking plays an important role in sustainable development in the building sector. However, the complexity of data collection and scope definition limits life cycle assessment (LCA) applications. Even if the inventory data have already been collected, tabulated, and indexed, the method is still time-consuming, which may be discouraging...

Even though it is in society's interest to mitigate hazard damage, investments in hazard resilience are often not made, in part due to uncertainty around the potential costs and their benefits. The goal of this paper is to introduce a new resilience metric for buildings that captures the maximum investment that can be made in hazard mitigation whil...

A pavement management system is a useful tool for departments of transportation to address the problems of limited budget and aging infrastructures. Previous research focuses mainly on the budget allocation process, trying to improve the optimization algorithms and consider the uncertainty of predictions for pavement deterioration. In any given pav...

Building retrofits are often motivated by the desire to improve the energy efficiency of a building. However, environmental burdens associated with additional materials used to accomplish energy efficiency are not usually taken into account. Life-cycle assessment (LCA) and life-cycle cost assessment (LCCA) approaches have been extensively applied t...

As project planners continue to move towards frameworks such as probabilistic life-cycle cost analysis to evaluate competing transportation investments, there is a need to enhance the current cost-estimation approaches that underlie these models to enable improved project selection. This paper presents an approach for cost estimation that combines...

Concerns about the planet's health call for a careful evaluation of the environmental impact of materials choices. Life-cycle assessment is a tool that can help identify sustainable materials pathways by considering the burdens of materials both during production and as a product.

Albedo is the measure of the fraction of solar energy reflected by the Earth’s surface. High-albedo surfaces, which are lighter in color, absorb less sunlight energy and reflect more shortwave radiation. The change in radiative energy balance, which is called radiative forcing (RF), reduces nearby air temperatures and impacts the surrounding buildi...

Despite isolated efforts in the cost assessment of design strategies for energy-efficient and resilient buildings, there is still a need for an integrated assessment that incorporates major expected costs over the entire lifecycle of the building for more comprehensive cost-benefit analysis. The main goal of this paper is to broaden the scope of co...

Life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA) is a commonly used approach by pavement engineers to compare the economic efficiency of alternative pavement design and maintenance strategies. Over the past two decades, the pavement community has augmented the LCCA framework used in practice by explicitly accounting for uncertainty in the decision-making process an...

What is the environmental impact of a house throughout its lifetime? This revised report (October 2016) summarizes research on life cycle assessment (LCA) of residential buildings in order to identify gaps in understanding as well as best practices for LCA methodology.

In order to reduce the energy consumption of a proposed building, it is valuable to be able to estimate the energy consumption at early stages of the design process when influential attributes are being decided upon. We present a novel use of a regression-based energy metamodel to guide the early design of single-family residential buildings by pro...

Life Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA) is an economic procedure often used to compare competing pavement designs. For the LCCA to be meaningful and reliable, the analysis must reflect the most likely activities for each alternative being evaluated. Currently, most state highway agencies (SHA) apply a standard, policy-set, rehabilitation schedule to all pa...

Practitioners increasingly use pavement management systems for determining the allocation of resources for multidecade investments. One important and uncertain input that will affect decisions in these frameworks is future changes in cost for rehabilitation and reconstruction actions. Despite this, existing paradigms overlook its consideration larg...

We propose a methodology for conducting robust comparative life cycle assessments (LCA) by leveraging uncertainty. The method evaluates a broad range of the possible scenario space in a probabilistic fashion while simultaneously considering uncertainty in input data. The method is intended to ascertain which scenarios have a definitive environmenta...

This paper describes the scope, methods, data, and results of a comprehensive quantitative analysis of generation, stock, and collection of used computers and monitors in the United States , specifically desktops, laptops, CRT monitors, and flat panel monitors in the decade leading up to 2010. Generation refers to used electronics coming directly o...

Variation in life cycle inventories (LCI) for a materials industry are significant but rarely reported, in spite of the fact that inventories are often created by aggregating data fromseveral locations. In this study, two approaches for aggregating LCI data, inventory-level (horizontal) and plant-level (vertical), were compared in the context of a...

Variation in life cycle inventories (LCI) for a materials industry are significant but rarely reported, in spite of the fact that inventories are often created by aggregating data from several locations. In this study, two approaches for aggregating LCI data, inventory-level (horizontal) and plant-level (vertical), were compared in the context of a...

In any life cycle assessment (LCA) for pavements, the designer must decide on which rehabilitation activities will be used to maintain the pavement over the analysis period. While this sounds simple, the fact is that there are many different rehabilitation scenarios that could be performed when the pavement requires rehabilitation, and which one is...

Purpose Reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the transportation sector is the goal of several current policies and battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are seen as one option to achieve this goal. However, the introduction of BEVs in the fleet is gradual and their benefits will depend on how they compare with increasingly more energy-efficient...

The rapid deterioration of infrastructure systems along with the shrinkage of funding resources necessitates cost-effective management of infrastructure networks. The existing methods for cost analysis of infrastructure networks are based on optimizing network costs for a limited period, and hence, are prone to: (i) shifting the cost burdens, (ii)...

Significant research has been conducted over the past decade to enhance probabilistic pavement life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA) models, yet the drawing of broad conclusions from different studies is difficult because of the significant variation in scope and sources of uncertainty. Specifically, these two issues make it difficult to infer from exist...

A primary input into any life cycle assessment (LCA) for pavements is the set of rehabilitation activities that are used to maintain the system over the analysis period. For the LCA to be meaningful and reliable, the analysis must reflect the most likely activities for each alternative over that analysis period. Currently, most state highway agenci...

The field of pavement life cycle assessment (LCA) has been continuously evolving and improving over time, but several limitations still exist. We try to address some of these limitations by conducting comparative LCAs using a probabilistic approach, incorporating various sources of uncertainty in input data and varying important contextual paramete...

There is limited convincing quantitative data on the export of used electronics from the United States (US). Thus, we advanced a methodology to quantify the export flows of whole units of used electronics from the US using detailed export trade data, and demonstrate the methodology using laptops. Since used electronics are not explicitly identified...

Life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA) is an important tool for evaluating the merits of alternative investments. Inevitably, inputs for an LCCA are subject to a high level of uncertainty in both the short and long term. However, the way LCCA is currently implemented in the field treats LCCA inputs as static, deterministic values. Conducting an analysis i...

Purpose: Electric vehicles (EVs) are promoted due to their potential for reducing fuel consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. A comparative life-cycle assessment (LCA) between different technologies should account for variation in the scenarios under which vehicles are operated in order to facilitate decision-making regarding the adoption...

Purpose The goal of this study is to evaluate and compare the environmental impact (with a focus on global warming potential) of five hand drying systems: hands-under (HU) dryers, high-speed hands-under (HSHU) dryers, high-speed hands-in (HSHI) dryers, cotton roll towels, and paper towels. Another objective is to incorporate uncertainty into this c...

Increasing the sustainability of our infrastructure is accomplished in ways other than just developing better materials and using recycled materials: it is also about employing the right designs. For concrete pavements, overdesign and use of poor features causes excess materials to be used during construction, leading to higher economic costs and e...

Increasing the sustainability of our infrastructure is accomplished in ways other than just developing better materials and using recycled materials: it is also about employing the right designs. For concrete pavements, overdesign causes excess materials to be used during construction, leading to higher economic costs and environmental impacts. Opt...

he growing demand from developing countries for used electronics, combined with higher recycling fees and wages for electronics disassembly in North America as compared to in developing countries, drives the export of some end of life (EOL) electronics to developing countries. Some exported EOL electronics are reused or recycled formally in factori...

There is growing need for effective and efficient environmental assessment tools for information technology (IT) products. This paper presents a streamlined life cycle analysis (LCA) methodology using a screening and triage approach. The methodology is applied to the case study of liquid crystal displays (LCDs). Global warming potential uncertainty...

This report documents the interim findings of the INSEAD IPR Network in relation to investigating practical solutions enabling implementation of Individual Producer Responsibility (IPR) for the WEEE Directive. The INSEAD IPR Network is a partnership of producers, academics and technical specialists from across the world working to identify, explore...

This paper presents an analysis of the material recovery system for leaded glass from cathode ray tubes (CRTs). In particular, the global mass flow of primary and secondary CRT glass and the theoretical capacities for using secondary CRT glass to make new CRT glass are analyzed. The global mass flow analysis indicates that the amount of new glass r...

hrough the development of a general model of electronics recycling systems, the effect of product portfolio choices on economic and environmental system performance is explored. The general model encompasses the three main functions of a recycling system-collection, processing, and system management-and allows for the effect of both contextual and...

Firms operating in the electronic waste (e-waste) recovery business, voluntarily or because of legislation, would like to develop strategies that minimize their financial burden. A mass flow and economic model is developed to quantify the variation of economic performance of an e-waste recovery system due to product, collection, and market uncertai...

Industry and research institutions are increasingly interested in understanding the energy, greenhouse gas, and toxicity burdens associated with the various life cycle phases of products: production, transport, use, and disposal. Plastic packaging has attracted attention for having noteworthy environmental impacts. Indeed, the European ban on certa...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is used increasingly as a tool to provide quantitative metrics of environmental impact and inform early stage materials selection decisions. One common challenge in LCA stems from allocation of burden when multiple adjacent products share some of the same processes. A critical example of this is the partitioning of benef...

This paper presents an analysis of the material recovery system for leaded glass from cathode ray tubes (CRTs) using a dynamic material flow analysis. In particular, the global mass flow of primary and secondary CRT glass and the theoretical capacities for using secondary CRT glass to make new CRT glass are analyzed. The global mass flow analysis i...

Through the development of a general model of electronics recycling systems, the effect of product portfolio choices on economic and environmental system performance is explored. The general model encompasses the three main functions of a recycling system-collection, processing, and system management-and allows for the effect of both contextual and...

This paper uses economic value metrics to evaluate the retention of value of secondary materials and provides a framework for characterizing value throughout a material and product life-cycle. These economic value metrics are compared with analogous life cycle assessment metrics in order to determine the conditions under which economic value effect...

Materials selection decisions exhibit great influence on the environmental performance of firms through their impact on processing technology, product form, and supply chain configuration. Consequently, materials dictate a product's environmental profile via the burden associated with extraction and refining, transformation from material to product...

A framework for evaluating the economic performance of a recycling system is proposed, and data from four electronics recycling systems in North America (Alberta, California, Maine, and Maryland) that use different operating models are used as a preliminary test of the framework. The framework is built around a hierarchy of descriptors that clarify...

A general model for evaluating the economic and environmental performance of electronics recycling systems is developed. This model comprehends the three main functions in a recycling system - collection, processing, and system management - and aims to enable quantification of the impact of context and system architecture on the performance of elec...

Electronics original equipment manufacturers are coming under increased scrutiny regarding their environmental performance, particularly around the issue of recycling. To address this pressure, companies need metrics that resolve the effectiveness of candidate recycling strategies. Such metrics not only provide guidance on the design and operation...

Several electronic waste recycling systems now exist worldwide in many different forms. In order to determine the optimal system structure for a location, a methodology for comparison must be established. This paper outlines a framework developed to compare the environmental and economic performance of recycling systems through analysis of both con...

In recent years, electronic waste has emerged as a waste stream of concern for many reasons; including the need to handle hazardous or extract valuable materials. Within this e- waste stream, cathode-ray tube (CRT) glass waste, from televisions (TVs) and computer monitors, is of particular concern because of high recycling costs and low secondary m...

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This paper explores the robustness of materials selection decisions when using various life-cycle assessment methods. Improving the environmental performance of vehicles is a topic of growing concern met by today's designer. One approach to this goal is through vehicle mass reduction, enabled through the implementation of a growing array of materia...

Utilizing alternative materials is an important tactic to improve the environmental performance of products. Currently a growing array of materials candidates confronts today's product designer. While life-cycle assessment (LCA) methods provide quantitative input into this selection decision, their implementations are evolving and disparate. The go...

Many authors suggest that market forces are inadequate to successfully manage the problems of resource availability and use. The fundamental question is whether these inadequacies are intrinsic to the market or if they arise from a failure of firms to detect and respond to subtle market signals. This paper explores the latter by describing (1) mech...

A framework for evaluating the economic performance of a recycling system is proposed and data from four electronics recycling systems in North America (Alberta, California, Maine, and Maryland) that use different operating models are used as a preliminary test of the framework. The framework is built around a hierarchy of descriptors that clarify...

Supply chain stakeholders should be aware of the stresses that supply chains place on materials use and the vulnerability of the supply base for that material to change. The question of materials availability is an issue that has been addressed many times over the past 200 years by scientists, engineers and economists, and it is an issue with many...

The use of alternative materials to reduce vehicle mass is a tactic often promoted as improving the fuel efficiency and environmental performance of vehicles. However, a growing array of materials candidates confronts today's designer. While life-cycle assessment methods are available to provide quantitative input into this selection decision, thei...

This paper presents a sustainability assessment of the material recovery system for leaded glass from cathode ray tubes (CRTs). In particular, the global mass flow of primary and secondary CRT glass and the theoretical capacities for using secondary CRT glass to make new CRT glass are analyzed. The global mass flow analysis indicates that the amoun...

This paper describes a model of end-of-life electronics recycling that uses process-based cost modeling and value-based metrics to determine the economic and value-recovery effectiveness of a processing operation. The process-based cost models combine engineering process models, operational models, and an economic framework to map from details of p...

A finite element model is created to investigate the contribution of inelastic matrix deformation at the crack tip to the composite toughness in a double cantilever beam specimen. The constituent properties are explicitly incorporated into the analysis using a global–local model and discrete fiber and matrix layers in the local model. The results i...

The disposal of end-of-life electronics is an issue receivi ng increasing scrutiny. This paper evaluates several alternatives for recycling cathode ray tubes (CRTs) within monitors and televisions. The primary recycling options for the glass, reuse in new CRTs or as a smelter flux, are examined from economic and environmental standpoints. The econo...

Developing predictive capabilities of composite material behavior from constituent properties is an important component of accelerating materials insertion. Many models exist that accomplish this objective for a range of material properties, but no such method is available for delamination properties. This thesis explores the issues associated with...