Goals and Strategies

Workshops as a first step to a new meta-discipline

The proposed workshops will develop a framework for advancing convergent research and scholarship on the NSF big idea “World Without Waste.” Our workshop will engage a large and diverse stakeholder community, integrating broad and deep knowledge cores. With this approach we hope to foster a new meta-discipline – with new disciplinary approaches, tools, and conceptual models to solve emerging problems.

After the first workshop, the teams will continue meeting by video conferencing to further develop and fine tune their ideas. A second workshop will synthesize the work of all groups and meetings and set a convergent strategy for the research and education needed to achieve a world without waste. Resulting ideas will be shared widely and used to develop additional avenues for discussion and convergence, including

  • Multi-institutional web site on a sustainable World Without Waste
  • A peer-reviewed journal article
  • A section on Engineering for Sustainability (EfS) will be established in the International Society for Industrial Ecology to facilitate regular conferences on this topic.
  • Additional grants and projects as identified

Workshop Goals

Using the lens of convergence, these workshops will examine the fundamental drivers underpinning the pressing challenge of spiraling global waste and resource consumption. Multidisciplinary research teams will explore integration of knowledge, methods, models, and data necessary for creating and evaluating potential solutions. These working groups will meet before and after the workshop to identify specific challenges and research needs in growing convergence research and education to meet the overarching goal. Co-creation of knowledge with stakeholder input will inform novel business models, engagement approaches, policy options, and innovative technical and science-based advances.

In aggregate, the workshops will address several critical questions:

  • What are the limits to eliminating wastes? Ayres has explored thermodynamic limits, but are there also economic and social limits? If so, how flexible are they, and what are the obstacles that must be overcome?
  • What are the key attributes of convergent approaches to mitigating the waste management problem?
  • What are the achievable benchmarks for reaching convergence around a sustainable “World Without Waste”?
  • Can we identify feasible pathways that if deployed at scale could meet benchmarks? What are the linkages, co-benefits, and conflicts across these pathways?
  • What are the opportunities for mimicking ecosystems to develop a sustainable, resilient and circular economy? What are the limits of such systems?
  • How can curricula at all levels: K-12, undergraduate, and graduate, be reimagined so that WWW problems can be more holistically solved through convergent thinking?
  • What would a new meta-engineering discipline look like, one that is the product of convergence around sustainable WWW?
  • What are the best ways to develop an inclusive community that engages scholars, practitioners, and policymakers in this new approach?
  • What role can professional societies play in revising bodies of knowledge, disseminating standards, and implementing practices?