Sabrina Spatari

Technion – Israel Institute of Technology | technion · Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Increased biodegradability, in other words reduced environmental recalcitrance, has the potential to be an important asset in the battle against plastics pollution. It can partially mitigate global plastic leakages into the environment, which is next to their impact on climate change the biggest concern regarding plastics use. Biodegradation should...

Floodplain restoration is an approved stormwater management method, but rarely chosen by developers due to the perceived high cost and lengthy approvals required from regulatory agencies. Yet, when chosen, restoring a floodplain yields significant environmental benefits for the community due to improved flood resiliency and wetland habitat and supe...

Biomass is a promising renewable feedstock for conversion to sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) to mitigate near-term greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Through metabolic engineering, sugars derived from pretreated and hydrolyzed cellulose...

Worldwide, the construction industry consumes major material resources and contributes to environmental waste. In the UK specifically, 15% of the 400 million tons of construction and demolition waste generated annually is directly landfilled due to overordering, mis-ordering or poor handling and fracturing, factors related to construction managemen...

Emerging nano-scale materials are under development for multiple uses in high-performance product applications such as advanced polymers. We apply prospective life cycle assessment (LCA) methods to evaluate alternative process scenarios for single chain polymer nanoparticles (SCNPs) synthesis through a photochemistry process, emphasizing the role o...

Emerging lead halide perovskite (LHP) photovoltaics are undergoing intense research and development due to their outstanding efficiency and potential for low manufacturing costs that render them competitive with existing photovoltaic (PV) technologies. While today's efforts are focused on stability and scalability of LHPs, the toxicity of lead (Pb)...

This paper investigates options to produce low carbon and renewable aviation fuel through existing commercial first generation biorefineries, which could be strategic given the rapid growth of the electric vehicle market for personal mobility. We evaluate the environmental impact of retrofitting a first generation biorefinery to produce aviation fu...

Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) with anaerobic digestion of biosolids produce an ammonia-rich sidestream out of which nitrogen can be recovered through air stripping. Recovered ammonia can be used to produce ammonium sulfate (AS) for agricultural use, enabling the circular return of nitrogen as fertilizer to the food system. We investigate the...

Lean construction focuses on eliminating process and operational wastes. The reduction of waste improves environmental performance by reducing GHG emissions. This research quantified the impacts of lean construction and VDC in reducing physical and operational wastes related to partition walls. The researchers observed worker activities at construc...

Life cycle assessment is used to systematically evaluate the environmental impact of underground plastic recharge chambers (RCs) used for stormwater management. Using cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment and a functional unit of 1 m3 stormwater capacity, different RC structure types, manufacturing processes and materials are considered. The invento...

Due to rapid urbanization, the construction industry in China consumes a significant quantity of material and is responsible for considerable greenhouse gas emissions. Prefabricated construction methods are promoted by the Chinese government because of their potential environmental and economic benefits towards enhancing the productivity and qualit...

Advanced computational tools like building information modeling (BIM) have great potential for facilitating environmental life cycle evaluation of buildings, including their construction, to support circular material flows from new and end-of-life (EOL) buildings. Here we introduce a method and case study that combines BIM and material flow analysi...

Up to 500 litres of water may be consumed at the batching plant per cubic meter of ready mix concrete, if water for washing mixing trucks and equipment is included. Demand for concrete is growing almost everywhere, regardless of local availability of freshwater. The use of freshwater for concrete production exacerbates stress on natural water resou...

Aquaponics is often presented as a sustainable food production system that can reduce environmental costs of global food production; yet, its actual environmental effects are understudied. The aim of this research was to review the limited number of life cycle assessment studies dealing with aquaponics, and to highlight environmental cost and benef...

Due to mounting impacts of climate change, particularly increased incidence of drought, hence water scarcity, it has become imperative to develop new technologies for recovering water from nutrient-rich, water-replete effluents other than sewage. Notably, anaerobic digestate could be harnessed for the purpose of water recovery by repurposing digest...

Biomass is a promising renewable feedstock to produce polyisoprene for the rubber industry. Through metabolic engineering, sugars derived from pretreated and hydrolyzed cellulose and hemicellulose can be directly fermented to isoprene to produce rubber. Here we investigate the life cycle environmental impact of isoprene fermentation to produce bio-...

District heating systems can improve energy efficiency, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and be a cost‐effective residential space heating alternative over conventional decentralized heating. This study uses radiative forcing, a time‐sensitive life cycle assessment metric, to evaluate space heating alternatives. We compare forest residue and willow...

The growth and complexity of construction projects have motivated the construction industry to implement cutting-edge technologies and new approaches in design and construction, including advanced computer-based design and project management methods like building information modeling (BIM) and lean construction. This paper evaluates multiple constr...

Purpose The study aims to test, measure and quantify the impacts of lean construction and BIM implementation on flow in construction projects. Design/methodology/approach Detailed control data from a set of 18 high-rise residential construction projects executed between years 2011 and 2020 were analyzed using the construction flow index (CFI), a m...

Aquaponics is an emerging industry promoted as a sustainable agricultural practice. Economic sustainability of aquaponics is challenging, partly because some of the benefits are external to the grower, necessitating public intervention to support the industry. We used life cycle assessment to estimate the environmental impact of a proposed aquaponi...

Floodplain restoration as a means of stormwater management (SWM) can benefit communities and the environment but is uncommonly chosen due to limited familiarity in rural and urban planning. This study uses life cycle assessment and life cycle costing (LCC) to compare four SWM alternatives for a typical rural setting undergoing development. We evalu...

The aluminum industry relies on calcined petroleum coke as an anode material for the smelting of aluminum oxide into aluminum metal. While distillate residues from biomass pyrolysis oils can convert into calcined coke with promising elemental and physical properties, no studies have produced calcined biocoke continuously from rotary kilns. Using a...

Computer simulations are used to study the production of renewable diesel through the biochemical transformation of biomass sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench] to free fatty acids using a genetically modified strain of Escherichia Coli. We evaluate select environmental and economic metrics using life cycle assessment (LCA) and techno-economic ana...

We investigate the use of rendered poultry fat, beef tallow, and soybean oil as ready sources of free fatty acids (FFAs) and triglycerides (TG) for conversion to renewable diesel. Laboratory scale saponification and decarboxylation experiments using trilaurin, lauric acid, protein, and water as a model compound representing rendered animal fat are...

Manufacturing lightweight aggregate (LWA) (ie, porous ceramics) by means of a sintering technique requires a delicate balance among three conditions: (a) forming a sufficient amount of molten liquid phase during sintering, (b) reaching an appropriate viscosity for solid‐liquid suspension, and (c) emitting a sufficient amount of gas that can be entr...

The selection of locations and practices for energy crops requires the economics to be planned and the carbon intensity of the fuel to be assessed. This study develops a framework for selecting near‐optimal cropland sites to minimize the cost to produce a targeted quantity of an energy crop, considering soil properties, fertilizer management, and s...

Cooling systems in power plants account for approximately 40% of total freshwater withdrawals in the U.S. Due to dwindling access to freshwater resources worldwide, continued operation of wet cooling systems poses a significant engineering challenge. To reduce water consumption, a novel air-cooled heat exchanger has been developed using encapsulate...

This paper compares the cost and life cycle environmental performance of renewable diesel produced from upgraded catalytic fast pyrolysis (CFP) and fast pyrolysis (FP) bio-oils produced from forest residues. Integrating zeolite catalyst into the pyrolysis reactor in CFP requires upgrading in one catalytic hydrocracking step, whereas FP requires upg...

There is a significant amount of waste generated during construction and demolition (C&D) activities, but few data to understand the sources, age, spatial origin, and its fate following entry into the waste management system. With few public records that track C&D waste flows, we turned to industry and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design...

Lean principles aim to improve construction through focus on value and waste elimination, which benefits environmental performance by reducing life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and improving other environmental metrics. Although prior research identified relationships between Lean, BIM and sustainability, most studies were qualitative asses...

Renewable fuel standards for biofuels have been written into policy in the U.S. to reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) intensity of transportation energy supply. Biofuel feedstocks sourced from within a regional market have the potential to also address sustainability goals. The U.S. Mid-Atlantic region could meet the advanced fuel designation specifie...

Multiple recent reports showed accelerated biodegradation of polyethylene by employing macro-organisms such as mealworms (Tenebrio molitor) and larvae of the greater wax moth (Galleria mellonella), which seemingly chew and digest the plastic. Nevertheless, doubts regarding analytical data were published, and results are not universally transferrabl...

Power plant coal combustion residues (CCR) that consist of bottom ash and off-spec fly ash may be beneficially converted to value-added construction materials thereby reducing disposal costs and landfilled waste. Coal ashes have been investigated as sources of raw material for lightweight aggregates owing to their mineral properties, using well-kno...

High density polyethylene (HDPE) is a thermoplastic used in many engineering applications but one that imposes environmental burdens when produced and environmental costs at end-of-life (EOL). Replacing pristine HDPE with post-consumer recycled (PCR) HDPE or bio-based polymer (bio-HDPE) in long-lived goods could mitigate those impacts. We investiga...

This volume gathers the proceedings of the 3rd International RILEM Workshop on Concrete Durability and Service Life Planning (ConcreteLife’20), held in Haifa, Israel in January 2020. The papers cover a range of topics in concrete curing, cracking in concrete structures, corrosion of steel in concrete, thermal and hygral effects, concrete in cold cl...

Technologies for upgrading fast pyrolysis bio‐oil to drop‐in fuels and co‐products are under development and show promise for decarbonizing energy supply for transportation and chemicals markets. The successful commercialization of these fuels and the technologies deployed to produce them depend on production costs, scalability, and yield. To meet...

This study evaluates the potential use of a novel lightweight aggregate (LWA), spherical porous reactive aggregate (SPoRA), produced from waste coal bottom ash, for internal curing of concrete. The engineering properties of SPoRA required for concrete internal curing were assessed including specific gravity, porosity, sphericity, water absorption,...

Like many specialty chemicals used in pharmaceutical, personal care and cosmetic products, few life cycle inventory data are available to describe the synthesis of isostearic acids (IA). We investigate the cradle-to-gate life cycle environmental and economic performance of IA production from soybean oil and tall oil, both renewable resources, using...

This study evaluates the feasibility of producing lightweight aggregates (LWA) using off-spec waste fly ash (FA) that would not meet the ASTM C618 standard specifications for direct use in concrete due to high loss on ignition (LOI) and moisture content. The production processes of LWA from off-spec fly ash were first introduced and the physical pr...

Biofuels vary greatly in their carbon intensity, depending on the specifics of how they are produced. Policy frameworks are needed to ensure that biofuels actually achieve intended reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Current approaches do not account for important variables during cultivation that influence emissions. Estimating emissions based...

There has been interest in producing fuel from oil seed crops for use on farms, however little guidance is available on where this may be profitable, the extent to which greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions may be mitigated or the cost associated with that mitigation. We conduct a national analysis to evaluate the economics of on-farm processing of soybe...

Lead halide perovskites (LHP) are an emerging class of photovoltaic (PV) materials that have drawn intense interest due to their power conversion efficiencies above 23% and their potential for low-cost fabrication. However, the toxicity of lead causes concern about its use in LHP-PV at large scales. Here, we quantified lead intensity and toxicity p...

This paper investigates strategies that could achieve an 80% reduction in transportation emissions from current levels by 2050 in the City of Philadelphia. The baseline daily lifecycle emissions generated by road transportation in the Greater Philadelphia Region in 2012 were quantified using trip information from the 2012 Household Travel Survey (H...

Biomass holds great promise for producing fuels, chemicals, and polymeric materials to address climate change and energy security. Polyisoprene, the raw material used to produce rubber, can be produced from rubber trees and synthesized from the monomer that is derived from both petrochemical feedstock and fermentable sugars in biomass. We explore s...

Bio-oil produced from fast pyrolysis of biomass is a promising substitute for crude oil that can meet climate change mitigation goals, but, due to its high oxygen content it requires upgrading to remove oxygen in order to be used as a transportation fuel. Hydrodeoxygenation (HDO) is one means of upgrading fast pyrolysis oil, however, its main limit...

Abstract New US Environmental Protection Agency regulations for the disposal of coal combustion residues (CCR) incentivize bottom-up recycling efforts, to convert them into value-added applications. This study examines producing lightweight ceramic aggregates from CCR for concrete/geotechnical applications. More specifically, we argue that industri...

Biomass resources could be used in the Northeastern U.S. in centralized district heating networks supplied by combined heat and power (CHP) plants to reduce consumption of petroleum resources (fuel oil), generate renewable electricity, and cost-effectively reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions when supplying buildings with space and water heating....

The production of cement, the primary ingredient in concrete, is responsible for 5–10% of anthropogenic GHG emissions. Numerous studies have investigated ordinary portland cement (OPC) alternatives with the goal of reducing GHG emissions. This life cycle assessment (LCA) adds transportation as a focus of the assessment, in addition to the process s...

Grease trap waste (GTW) and sewage scum grease (SSG) are underutilized, high-lipid waste streams that have the potential to be converted into biodiesel. This paper presents a longitudinal study of GTW and SSG samples that were obtained over a one year period; GTW was sampled from a storage tank at a grease collection company and SSG was sampled fro...

Horse manure, whose improper disposal imposes considerable environmental costs, constitutes an apt feedstock for conversion to renewable fuels and chemicals when tail gas reactive pyrolysis (TGRP) is employed. TGRP is a modification of fast pyrolysis that recycles its non-condensable gases and produces a bio-oil low in oxygen concentration and rich...

A life cycle assessment (LCA) and cost analysis were conducted to compare the environmental and economic performance of nanocomposite polymers that use pristine and recycled high density polyethylene (HDPE) polymer with pristine, and pristine/recycled HDPE polymeric materials in drainage pipe. We evaluate three performance metrics; (a) non-renewabl...

The effects of recycled high density polyethylene (HDPE) and nanoclay on the stress crack resistance (SCR) of pristine HDPE were evaluated using the Notched Constant Ligament Stress (NCLS) test. The test data were analyzed by both linear elastic fracture mechanics (LEFM) and elastic plastic fracture mechanics (EPFM). The LEFM approach uses the stre...

Greenhouse gas (GHG) intensity is frequently used to assess the mitigation potential of biofuels, however, failure to quantify other environmental impacts may result in unintended consequences, effectively shifting the environmental burden of fuel production rather than reducing it. We modeled production of E85, a gasoline/ethanol blend, from forag...

Uruguay is pursuing renewable energy production pathways using feedstocks from its agricultural sector to supply transportation fuels, among them ethanol produced from commercial technologies that use sweet and grain sorghum. However, the environmental performance of the fuel is not known. We investigate the life cycle environmental and cost perfor...

A modeling process was developed to examine the economic and environmental benefits of utilizing energy crops for bioenergy products in the northeastern United States. Three energy crops (hybrid willow, switchgrass, and Miscanthus) that can potentially grow on marginal agricultural land or abandoned mine land in the region were considered in the an...

Existing research on the economic sustainability of urban agriculture in the United States tends to emphasize a multifaceted conception of urban agriculture’s return on investment as a combination of revenue and less quantifiable positive external­ities. A more business-oriented advocacy literature, however, sees urban agriculture as a way to gener...

The guayule (Parthenium argentatum) plant is a source of natural rubber and a possible high-energy biofuel. Herein guayule bagasse, the residual biomass after latex extraction, which accounts for 90% of the processed plant material, is modeled in a fast pyrolysis biorefining process. The simulation uses PRO/II® software and is based on data and pro...

Feed-in tariffs and Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) are among the most prominent policies to address anthropogenic influence on climate change. Implementation of RPS favorably affects renewable energy supply and rural development while reducing the land available for meeting demand for food and feed resulting from global population growth. Even...

This study employed the J-integral approach to investigate the effect of recycled HDPE and nanoclay contents on the long-term stress cracking behavior of pristine HDPE. This behavior was conventionally approached by using stress intensity factor K, which defined the stress cracking behavior as two failure mechanisms: creep and slow crack growth (SC...

Grease trap waste (GTW) is a low-quality waste material with variable lipid content that is an untapped resource for producing biodiesel. Compared to conventional biodiesel feedstocks, GTW requires different and additional processing steps for biodiesel production due to its heterogeneous composition, high acidity, and high sulfur content. Life cyc...

The effect of nanoclay on the plane-strain fracture behavior of pristine High density polyethylene (HDPE) and recycled HDPE blends was studied using the essential work of fracture (EWF) concept. The failure mode of EWF tested specimens was found to be associated with the specific non-EWF (βBwp,B). Adding 6-wt% of nanoclay to pristine HDPE and 2-wt%...

This report reviews approaches for achieving reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in Philadelphia that are commensurate with the goal of achieving an 80% reduction in emissions by the year 2050. The analysis includes emissions occurring within city limits and emissions due to electricity generated outside the city but consumed within city limits....

Second generation biofuels offer a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and storing or delaying soil carbon emissions relative to petroleum-based fuels depending upon the strategy used to synthesize the biofuel and co-products. Unless mitigated, the soil organic carbon and nitrogen loss resulting from removing agricultural residues for biofue...