Every few months, the compost 

bins from the University of Michi-
gan dining halls get picked clean 
— not by a family of raccoons, but 
by a team of researchers in the Civil 
and Environmental Engineering 
department. 

Engineering professor Lutgarde 

Raskin and her research team have 
been gathering samples of food 
waste from U-M students for their 
research. The team is working on a 
$6.8 million dollar project aiming 
to develop biodigesters inspired by 
cows with a goal goal to create an 
efficient and cost-effective way to 
extract energy from organic waste.

According to Mechanical Engi-

neering professor Steve Skerlos, a 
co-investigator on the project, the 
bioreactor is inspired by the cow 
stomach’s efficient digestion of 
tough organic materials.

“A cow just grows on grass, and 

we’re kind of harnessing this bio-
inspired design, which is pretty 
clever and fairly simple,” Skerlos 
said. 

Renisha Karki, CEE doctoral 

pre-candidate on the team, says 
the food waste “smoothie” is fed 
to bacteria growing inside the bio-
reactor, a complex series of tubs 
and tubes stacked on top of tables 
in the corner of the lab. A single 
eraser-sized metal box measures 
the flow rate of the biogas — a mix-
ture of methane and carbon diox-
ide — produced from the system. 
At the same time, Raskin’s collabo-
rators outside the University are 
researching methods to convert 
biogas into renewable natural gas. 

Organic material is broken 

down inside the bioreactor using 
anaerobic digestion, meaning that 
the bacteria digesting the organic 
material do not need oxygen to sur-
vive, Tim Fairley-Wax, a research 
lab specialist and CEE alum, said. 

Fairley-Wax 
said 
anaerobic 

technology is useful because it can 
break down tougher materials like 
sewage sludge or food waste. Cur-
rently, much of the organic waste 
in the United States is thrown into 
landfills or compost piles, where it 
emits large amounts of methane 
into the atmosphere as it decom-
poses. 

“We’re very inefficient in deal-

ing with our waste, we just bury 
and forget about it,” Kuang Zhu, a 
CEE postdoctoral researcher on 
the team, said.

Despite the potential usefulness 

of anaerobic technology in deal-
ing with organic waste, Zhu said 
anaerobic technology is not widely 
implemented.

“It’s costly,” Zhu said. “It’s 

expensive to build and it’s also 
very demanding to operate. There 
is also a slow reaction happening 
within the reactor. The anaerobic 
process takes days to weeks. So this 
means that the organic waste just 
spends a lot of time in the reactor.” 

As such, Fairly-Wax said only 

the wealthiest investors have the 
means to implement anaerobic 
technologies. 

“Chevron and Exxon Mobil 

have financed these anaerobic 
digesters at some Michigan farms,” 
Fairley-Wax said. “But right now 
that technology has to be done 
with a huge investor because it’s 
relatively extremely expensive.”

To solve this problem, Zhu said 

the group hopes to make cost-
effective anaerobic technology for 
widespread use at large industrial 
facilities as well as smaller opera-
tions. 

“We can hopefully use this 

technology (to) reduce the costs 
so that smaller-scale users can uti-
lize them … for a variety of waste 
streams, not limited to just waste-
water sludge,” Zhu said. “It could 
be food waste, could be manure, 
could be a lot of organic waste 
streams.”

Raskin’s group is collaborat-

ing with researchers at Argonne 
National Laboratory and North-
western University who are look-
ing into how biogas can be turned 
into high-purity methane, a renew-
able natural gas that can be used to 
heat homes. 

Heating homes with high-

purity methane still emits carbon 
dioxide into the atmosphere, Sker-
los noted, making this research a 
necessary “short-term win” until 
a future with no greenhouse gas 
emissions can be reached. 

“It’s not a perfect win. A perfect 

win is when you take that methane, 
and you emit no carbon dioxide 
to the atmosphere,” Skerlos said. 
“(But) carbon dioxide has 50 times 
less greenhouse gas potential than 
methane.”

Meanwhile, the group said that 

their first project outside the lab 
is to retrofit current wastewater 
treatment plants with their biore-
actor system in order to extract and 
utilize energy from food waste. 

Skerlos said wastewater treat-

ment accounts for roughly 4% of 
the electricity used in the United 
States. A large part of energy 

expenditure at wastewater treat-
ment plants is on the sterilization 
of the material generated while 
treating the water, Pedro Puente, 
a CEE doctoral candidate and a 
member of Raskin’s team, added. 

“The goal will be for the waste-

water treatment plants to include 
food waste streams into the treat-
ment, so they can recover even 
more energy,” Puente said. “They 
can become energy neutral or even 
generate their own electricity for 
their operations.”

Skerlos said his team believes 

their bioreactor can reduce costs of 
treating sewage by 25% to 50%. 

“What you’re getting is basi-

cally free power for the wastewa-
ter treatment,” Skerlos said. “And 
you’re also creating free natural 
gas that you can put in the pipeline 
that you didn’t have to frack out 
of the earth. You’re saving a lot of 
money.” 

The team at the University is 

partnering with the Great Lakes 
Water Authority to run a pilot 
system at their water treatment 
plant in Detroit. Skerlos hopes they 
will have a demonstration project 
launched in the next five years. 

“We’re doing this with very cost-

effective technology that can be 
deployed, not only in Detroit and in 
industrialized rich countries, (but 
also) in developing countries (or) in 
very rural locations,” Skerlos said.

Zhu said he remembers being 

shocked when he first learned how 
waste is dealt with and empha-
sized the need for better methods 
of waste disposal. 

“We’re 
getting 
surrounded 

more and more by trash,” Zhu said. 
“Developing solutions to help us 
have a better, more efficient man-
agement of our waste will help us 
have a better relationship with our 
society and our environment. So 
we don’t leave this legacy to our 
next generations.”

The researchers also empha-

sized the importance of recogniz-
ing the amount and type of waste 
humans generate, particularly in 
Ann Arbor where the collection of 
waste is highly regulated. 

“It’s just a matter of education 

on how to separate your waste and 
be responsible about it because the 
waste that you generate is yours,” 
Puente said. “So take advantage of 
the programs that the city offers 
because there are not a lot of places 
that do this separate collection.”

Daily Staff Reporter Elissa Welle 

can be reached at elissajw@umich.
edu.

In 2018, the U-M Ann Arbor cam-

pus launched the Go Blue Guaran-
tee program, which grants coverage 
of full tuition for in-state students 
whose families make $65,000 or 
less. In the years since and follow-
ing student activists advocating for 
its expansion, the program has been 
brought to both satellite campuses 
at Flint and Dearborn with an added 
controversial GPA requirement, 
mandating that incoming freshmen 

must have a 3.5 GPA while returning 
students must have a 3.0 GPA. 

Recently, 
however, 
Schlissel 

received backlash from the campus 
community after releasing a survey 
portraying expanded tuition assis-
tance to Flint and Dearborn as aca-
demic and financial burdens for the 
Ann Arbor campus.

The University is the second-

largest provider of financial aid and 
institutional grants to freshmen 
among the nation’s public research 
universities, offering about $256.9 
million. The University budget also 
saw a 6.4% increase in financial 

aid allocation, about a $15.5 million 
increase, according to the Record 
article. 

Brumfield said the University’s 

recruitment efforts were adapted to 
the COVID-19 pandemic world. 

“From what I have learned, col-

laboration increased and partner-
ships were strengthened over the 
past year as the campus united to 
enroll the fall class of 2021,” Brum-
field said.

Daily Staff Reporter Navya Gupta 

can be reached at itznavya@umich.
edu.

The University of Michigan Ford 

School of Public Policy hosted a dis-
cussion with Dr. Tedros Adhanom 
Ghebreyesus, director-general of 
the World Health Organization, 
on Oct. 20 in partnership with the 
School of Public Health. Public 
Health Dean F. Dubois Bowman 
moderated the discussion, which 
centered around global responses to 
the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. 

Before being elected into his 

current position in 2017, Dr. Tedros 
worked as Minister of Health for 

Ethiopia’s federal government, 

where he led a major comprehen-
sive reform of the country’s health 
system, and as Minister of Foreign 
Affairs, where he raised health as a 
political issue globally. 

Bowman 
began 
by 
asking 

Tedros how he and his team have 
been able to make decisions during 
the COVID-19 pandemic and in the 
face of intense uncertainty. 

“Public health has been politi-

cized during the pandemic in a way 
we’ve never seen before,” Bowman 
said. “Public health workers have 
faced dangerous and life-threaten-
ing behavior.”

Tedros said health care leaders 

had to ask themselves a variety of 

complex questions in the face of 
the pandemic, and he discussed 
the questions that guide his team in 
their decision-making.

“What 
level 
of 
restrictions 

should be imposed while preserv-
ing individual freedoms? How do 
we allocate resources?” Tedros 
said. “Many of these decisions are 
made under intense pressure from 
the public — the choice to invest in 
primary healthcare and infrastruc-
ture, the choice to give trust to com-
munities through a strong social 
contract.”

Tedros then discussed how the 

politicization of public health has 
led to vaccine inequity. He said 
politicization does not position 
COVID-19 as a common enemy, 
while in reality, that is exactly what 
it is.

“Politicians use the virus to 

score points against their oppo-
nents and to politicize masks and 
vaccination,” Tedros said. “Please 
don’t politicize this, this is a com-
mon enemy; please use other things 
against your opponents. Some will 
follow their leaders and listen to 
them saying not to wear a mask. 
They will get exposed, and the virus 
will continue to spread.”

Tedros emphasized the need for 

vaccine equity, or equal distribu-
tion of the vaccine around the world 
regardless of race or socioeconomic 
status, to make sustainable change 

in stopping the virus from spread-
ing and mutating. As an example to 
show the inequity of the vaccine’s 
distribution, he mentioned that only 
5% of the entire population of Africa 
is fully vaccinated. 

“We are facing a two-track pan-

demic fueled by vaccine inequity,” 
Tedros said. “This is economically 
self-defeating, not only ethically 
immoral; the longer vaccine ineq-
uity exists, the longer the virus can 
mutate.”

LSA sophomore Caroline Dean 

attended the talk and said she feels 
strongly about the consequences 
of making the pandemic a political 
issue. She said she believes the loss of 
lives due to COVID-19 is, at its core, 
caused by the beliefs and actions pro-
moted by political leaders. 

“Politicizing the COVID pan-

demic, in my opinion, is just as 
bad as the pandemic itself,” Dean 
said. “Now that we have a vaccine, 
political incentives are doing the 
killing — life and death should be 
non-partisan, and if we want this 
pandemic to pass with limited loss, 
both sides of the political spectrum 
must first acknowledge the virus 
and its various scientific and public 
health components.”

Daily News Contributor Chava 

Makman-Levinson can be reached at 
cmakman@umich.edu.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
News
Wednesday, October 27, 2021 — 3

Team works to develop sustainable biodigesters inspired by cows

CAMPUS LIFE

World Health Organization 

director talks depoliticization of 

the COVID-19 pandemic

CHAVA 

MAKMAN-LEVINSON 

Daily Staff Reporter

ELISSA WELLE
Daily Staff Reporter

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus discusses worldwide 
vaccine inequity, recent treatment of healthcare workers 

Design by Madison Grosvenor

“I congratulate the members of 

the U-M Flint community on the 
recent awarding of a $3.8 million 
federal grant to build the Inno-
vation and Technology Center,” 
Schlissel said. “This is an impor-
tant moment in the history of this 
campus as it responds to the needs 

of the region and the students it 
serves.”

Chris Pearson, dean of the U-M 

Flint College of Innovation and 
Technology, gave a presentation 
on the new Innovation and Tech-
nology Center. Pearson said the 
new building will allow greater 
interaction 
and 
collaboration 

between U-M Flint and the greater 
Flint community.

“The building … will facilitate 

collaboration between academia 
and community and business 
partners,” Pearson said. “This new 
facility will provide our students 
and faculty with the resources 
needed to address the global chal-
lenges of the future.”

Daily Staff Reporters Justin 

O’Beirne and Julia Forrest can be 
reached at justinob@umich.edu and 
juforres@umich.edu. 

ENROLLMENT
From Page 1

ENDOWMENT 
From Page 1

University 
President 
Mark 

Schlissel began the Oct. 21 Board of 
Regents meeting by acknowledging 
the survivors of former University 
athletic doctor Robert Anderson, 
who has been accused of over 2,000 
incidents of sexual abuse. 

One survivor, Jonathan Vaughn, 

a former U-M running back, has 
camped outside of Schlissel’s South 
University residence since Oct. 8 
to raise awareness of the situation 
and demand accountability from 
the University.He has said he will 
continue to do so until Schlissel 
and the Board of Regents agree to a 
meeting with him. 

“We’ve 
heard 
from 
many 

survivors of abuse by Dr. Robert 
Anderson,” 
Schlissel 
said. 
“We 

thank them for coming forward and 
sharing deeply personal and painful 
stories, through public comment 
sessions with investigators to news 
media and demonstrations, including 
the one on the Ann Arbor campus in 
front of my house. The Regents and 
I have heard them. We are listening 
intently and encourage any survivors 
to speak out.”

Following the Regents meeting, 

Vaughn held a conference call outside 
of Schlissel’s residence to respond 
to his comments, saying Schlissel 
has yet to speak directly with him 
or other survivors that had been 
camped outside his house for 13 days, 
as of the Oct. 21 Regents meeting.

“I’ve never heard (Schlissel) speak 

to any Anderson survivors,” Vaughn 
said. “I was standing 100 feet from 

him yesterday, I know he knew who 
I was because we were standing 
on the sidewalk as he was walking 
toward his house, and he never spoke 
a word.”

Vaughn 
also 
expressed 
his 

frustrations that Schlissel hasn’t 
introduced himself to Vaughn and 
other Anderson survivors.

“I’m not trying to resolve this case 

in an interaction with the President 
at his house. But, speak to me like 
a human being — that has never 
been done,” Vaughn said. “We’re 
always referred to as either John 
Does or victims. What would I like 
him to say? How about just ‘Hello’? 
Introduce yourself.”

Daily Staff Reporters Christian 

Juliano and Justin O’Beirne can be 
reached at julianoc@umich.edu and 
justinob@umich.edu.

Schlissel responds to Anderson 
survivors at Regents meeting

CHRISTIAN JULIANO & 

JUSTIN O’BEIRNE 
Daily Staff Reporters

Protesters outside President’s house frustrated with lack of acknowledgement

After dedicating much of his three 

years at the University of Michigan 
to telling his story and working 
in disability advocacy, LSA senior 
Vincent Pinti has been awarded this 
year’s James T. Neubacher Award, a 
recognition reserved for University 
affiliates. 

The 
award 
is 
named 
after 

Neubacher, a University alum and 
journalist for the Detroit Free Press, 
who wrote a nationally recognized 
column called “Disabled in Detroit” 
shortly after he was diagnosed with 
multiple sclerosis in 1979. 

Pinti is the first undergraduate 

to win in recent years and was 
awarded in recognition of his work 
through Central Student Government 
to improve the accessibility for 
students with disabilities on campus. 
Students at the University have long 
struggled to receive appropriate 
disability 
accommodations 
with 

their departments and Services for 
Students with Disabilities, claiming 
confusing 
and 
time-consuming 

processes that hindered their ability 
to receive accommodations.

After facing some challenges with 

accessibility and accommodations 
during his first year on campus, Pinti 

dedicated himself to ensuring no 
student with a disability has to suffer 
through what he did. Pinti said he 
has spinal-muscular atrophy, which 
means he uses a wheelchair and was 
born into what he called a “disabled 
world.”

“I’ve always felt the need to 

advocate because there are so many 
people that have disabilities,but for 
whatever reason might not be able to 
share their lived experience and might 
not be able to share the adversity that 
they have to go through to get the 
resources that they need,” Pinti said. 

The 
Neubacher 
Award 
is 

presented annually during Disability 
Community Month. The project 
Pinti is being recognized for is his 
work creating the Personal Assistant/
Personal Care Assistant (PA/PCA) 
scholarship program. 

PA/PCAs help people with chronic 

illness or disabilities meet their daily 
mental and physical health needs. 
This scholarship, sponsored by CSG, 
internally 
provides 
educational 

funding for students working in this 
field. Pinti said there is a dire need for 
people working in these positions due 
to understaffing in the field. 

“It’s 
hard 
work, 
oftentimes 

manual labor, and there’s not a lot of 
demand for it because they don’t get 
compensated very much at all from 
the state, so the students are going 

above and beyond by doing this,” Pinti 
said. “That’s why I decided to build 
this scholarship.” 

Pinti has also been involved 

in numerous other initiatives on 
campus, such as pushing for metal 
straws in the dining halls, ensuring 
environmental anti-plastic initiatives 
don’t impact disabled students on 
campus and helping design more 
accessible 
emergency 
procedures 

in campus buildings. He is also 
currently working on developing a 
PA/PCA database of student workers 
to address the caregiver shortage in 
Michigan. 

“Students can play a role in this, U 

of M can play a role in building this 
database,” Pinti said. “So I would just 
give a call to action that U of M needs 
to build the PCA database now.” 

Stephanie Rosen, chair of the 

Council of Disability Concerns, said 
the award honors those advocating on 
behalf of disabled individuals just as 
Neubacher did.

“He was an advocate for truth, 

access for himself, and for the broader 
disability communities,” Rosen said. 
“This award was named in his honor, 
as a memorial to his work and to 
recognize work that carries on that 
legacy.” 

Vincent Pinti wins 2021 James T. 
Neubacher Award for disability 

advocacy for work on CSG 

PAIGE HODDER 
Daily Staff Reporter

LSA senior is first undergrad to recieve the recognition in recent years

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

UMich researchers convert 
food waste into usable energy

