Cooperative Program Providing Public and Private Sectors with Information for Useon Examination of Environmental Issues

摘要

Establishment of the Texas Regional Institute for Environmental Studies as amulti-disciplinary, integrated, environmental research program has been accomplished. A set of discrete projects were undertaken by the Institute in order to demonstrate the efficacy of such an entity to successfully address a diversity of environmental problems. Within these projects, an array of environmental problems were addressed with the multi-disciplinary teams. Multi-disciplinary teams were formed through cooperation among academic departments, colleges, and institutions; government agencies, and private companies. Public private partnerships were formed to address some of the problems. The problems addressed included: several projects for ecosystem-level natural resources management on military installations (including neighboring properties), development of activity based costing methodology identifying environmental costs, development of statistically based image analysis systems, development of new methods to reduce pollution from chemical synthesis operations, and development of a model air permitting strategy for industrial operations. Results from each of these projects, by their integrated nature, promote efficiency of operations, with concomitant potential for cost savings in future operations.