A Roadmap to Reduce U.S. Food Waste by 20 Percent

The magnitude of the food waste problem is difficult to comprehend. The U.S. spends $218 billion a year -- 1.3% of GDP -- growing, processing, transporting, and disposing of food that is never eaten. The causes of food waste are diverse, ranging from crops that never get harvested, to food left on overfilled plates, to near-expired milk and stale bread. ReFED is a coalition of over 30 business, nonprofit, foundation, and government leaders committed to building a different future, where food waste prevention, recovery, and recycling are recognized as an untapped opportunity to create jobs, alleviate hunger, and protect the environment -- all while stimulating a new multi-billion dollar market opportunity. ReFED developed A Roadmap to Reduce U.S. Food Waste as a data-driven guide to collectively take action to reduce food waste at scale nationwide.This Roadmap report is a guide and a call to action for us to work together to solve this problem. Businesses can save money for themselves and their customers. Policymakers can unleash a new wave of local job creation. Foundations can take a major step in addressing environmental issues and hunger. And innovators across all sectors can launch new products, services, and business models. There will be no losers, only winners, as food finds its way to its highest and best use

Energy Efficient Service Delivery in Clouds in Compliance with the Kyoto Protocol

Cloud computing is revolutionizing the ICT landscape by providing scalable and efficient computing resources on demand. The ICT industry - especially data centers, are responsible for considerable amounts of CO2 emissions and will very soon be faced with legislative restrictions, such as the Kyoto protocol, defining caps at different organizational levels (country, industry branch etc.) A lot has been done around energy efficient data centers, yet there is very little work done in defining flexible models considering CO2. In this paper we present a first attempt of modeling data centers in compliance with the Kyoto protocol. We discuss a novel approach for trading credits for emission reductions across data centers to comply with their constraints. CO2 caps can be integrated with Service Level Agreements and juxtaposed to other computing commodities (e.g. computational power, storage), setting a foundation for implementing next-generation schedulers and pricing models that support Kyoto-compliant CO2 trading schemes

Capturing Energy Waste in Ohio: Using Combined Heat and Power to Upgrade Our Electric System

Assesses the state's potential for capturing heat generated during electricity production or industrial processes to meet thermal needs, cut fossil fuel use, and reduce emissions. Recommends ways to remove barriers to combined heat and power adoption

Checked Out: How U.S. Supermarkets Fail to Make the Grade in Reducing Food Waste

Supermarkets have an enormous influence on the food system. That influence extends to the environmental footprint of food waste — from farm to fork. As the primary place where most Americans purchase food, supermarkets influence what makes it from farms to shelves, what happens to unsold food and even how much and what types of food shoppers buy (Escaron, A. 2013). Food waste has become a critical issue in recent decades. Roughly 40 percent of the food produced in the United States goes uneaten — costing more than $200 billion each year and creating unnecessary impacts on water supplies, clean air, climate and wildlife (ReFED, 2016). This report analyzes key food-waste reduction commitments, policies and actions across the top supermarket chains in the United States. Using publicly available information and details provided by company officials, we evaluated and graded 10 companies — Ahold Delhaize, Albertsons, ALDI, Costco, Kroger, Publix, Target, Trader Joe's, Walmart and Whole Foods Market — that operate a combined total of more than 13,000 grocery stores across the country. The analysis was also applied to Tesco U.K. as an example of a major European supermarket that has adopted effective food-waste reduction policies.Our key findings:Nine out of America's 10 largest grocery companies fail to publicly report their total volume of food waste. Ahold Delhaize was the only company that publicly reported its total food-waste volume.The four companies that earned a C grade or higher overall were the only ones with specific food-waste reduction commitments. Kroger leads the way with a commitment of zero food waste by 2025.Four of the 10 companies have no "imperfect-produce initiatives," which can prevent the waste of fruits and vegetables considered too "imperfect" for retail sale.Walmart was the only company with a variety of clear in-store efforts to reduce food waste, such as improving store fixtures, standardizing date labels, and educating associates and shoppers.All 10 of the companies have food-donation programs, with the majority operating company-wide. ALDI was the only company that did not report a food-recycling program (e.g., composting or a program to reuse unsold food as animal feed or for other industrial uses)

Implementing Connections: The Benefits for Greater Philadelphia

This analysis utilizes DVRPC's modeling capabilities to illustrate and quantify the benefits of implementing the policies and goals defined in the Connections Plan, through a Plan scenario, compared to a continuation of our region's business-as-usual Trend scenario. Both scenarios are set in the horizon year of the Plan, 2035, and compared to each other and current conditions (2010)

Reducing Livability: How Sustainability Planning Threatens the American Dream

This report posits that sustainability plans are infringing on people's rights and preventing them from securing the type of housing they desire

Getting on Track: Good Investments for Pennsylvania's Public Transit System

Provides an overview of the state's transit system and summarizes opportunities for investment in rapid transit, rail, and bus lines in each region. Includes policy recommendations

Measuring and Managing Answer Quality for Online Data-Intensive Services

Online data-intensive services parallelize query execution across distributed software components. Interactive response time is a priority, so online query executions return answers without waiting for slow running components to finish. However, data from these slow components could lead to better answers. We propose Ubora, an approach to measure the effect of slow running components on the quality of answers. Ubora randomly samples online queries and executes them twice. The first execution elides data from slow components and provides fast online answers; the second execution waits for all components to complete. Ubora uses memoization to speed up mature executions by replaying network messages exchanged between components. Our systems-level implementation works for a wide range of platforms, including Hadoop/Yarn, Apache Lucene, the EasyRec Recommendation Engine, and the OpenEphyra question answering system. Ubora computes answer quality much faster than competing approaches that do not use memoization. With Ubora, we show that answer quality can and should be used to guide online admission control. Our adaptive controller processed 37% more queries than a competing controller guided by the rate of timeouts.Comment: Technical Repor

CleanTX Analysis on the Smart Grid

The utility industry in the United States has an opportunity to revolutionize its electric grid system by utilizing emerging software, hardware and wireless technologies and renewable energy sources. As electricity generation in the U.S. increases by over 30% from today’s generation of 4,100 Terawatt hours per year to a production of 5,400 Terawatt hours per year by 2030, a new type of grid is necessary to ensure reliable and quality power. The projected U.S. population increase and economic growth will require a grid that can transmit and distribute significantly more power than it does today. Known as a Smart Grid, this system enables two- way transmission of electrons and information to create a demand-response system that will optimize electricity delivery to consumers. This paper outlines the issues with the current grid infrastructure, discusses the economic advantages of the Smart Grid for both consumers and utilities, and examines the emerging technologies that will enable cleaner, more efficient and cost- effective power transmission and consumption.IC2 Institut