The conference aims to gather leading experts and researchers from various scientific fields to exchange knowledge, discuss challenges, and explore innovative solutions for sustainability. It provides a platform for professionals across different disciplines to present their sustainability-related work and promotes collaboration to advance sustainable practices, policies, and technologies. The scope of the conference encompasses contributions from diverse areas such as engineering, IT, design, health, economics, sport, arts, teaching, social sciences, political sciences, agriculture, food engineering, architecture, transportation, and law.

Themes:

sustainability in: engineering; IT; design; health; economics; sport; arts; teaching; social sciences; political sciences; agriculture; food engineering; architecture; transportation; law

Plenary 1: Economic inequality and sustainable capitalism (Prof V Venkatasubramanain), USA – 2023. 10. 12. (Thursday) 17:40 - 18:30

Extreme economic inequality is widely seen as a serious threat to the future of stable and vibrant capitalist democracies. In 2015, the World Economic Forum in Davos identified deepening income inequality as the number one challenge of our time. Yet some inequality is inevitable, even desirable and necessary, for capitalist societies to work productively. Different people have different skills and capacities for work, so they make different contributions to society, some more, others less. Therefore, it is only fair that those who contribute more earn more.

But how much more? What is the fairest inequality of income?

This critical question is at the heart of the inequality debate. The debate is not so much about inequality per se - it is about fairness. This central question about fair inequality has remained open in economics and political philosophy for over two centuries. Mainstream economics has offered little guidance on the fair distribution of income. Political philosophy, meanwhile, has much to say about fairness yet relies on qualitative theories, such as the ones by Rawls and by Nozick, which empirical data cannot verify.

In this talk, I will present a novel framework for answering this question quantitatively. My theory leads to surprising insights into the political philosophy, economics, game theory, and statistical mechanics perspectives of this question. It lays the groundwork for sustainable capitalism through better economic and social policies.

Plenary 2: Sustainable Process Systems Engineering for a chemical sector within planetary boundaries (Prof G Guillén-Gosálbez), Switzerland – 2023. 10. 13. (Friday) 09:00 - 09:40

Plenary 3: Environmental releases and occupational exposure to support risk assessment and circular economy – 2023. 10. 13. (Friday) 09:40 - 10:30

Chemicals in industrial and commercial products play crucial roles in the life quality of humankind. However, these substances need proper management during their manufacturing, use, and end-of-life stages to maximize economic and social benefits while minimizing harmful effects on human health and the environment. Chemical risk and sustainability assessments look to find events, exposure scenarios, and processing steps that may result in adverse environmental, economic, and human health outcomes by understanding, minimizing, and preventing their causes. Therefore, estimating comprehensive material flow data and activities is crucial in performing risk assessments for guiding industrial, government, and community stakeholders toward circular economy initiatives. This talk will describe current efforts on developing material flow inventories to estimate potential environmental chemical releases during material recycling, disposal, and energy recovery activities and describe exposure scenarios. In addition, this presentation intends to illustrate how the potential releases, hazards, and risks aid in developing safer recycling infrastructures to oversee chemicals and support sustainable materials management efforts to achieve a U.S. chemical circular economy.

Plenary 4: Panel Discussion on International Research Center for Sustainable Systems (chaired by R. Gani & F. Friedler) – 2023. 10. 13. (Friday) 14:00 - 14:40

Plenary 5: Sustainable manufacturing of novel biologics: Design and scale-up issues (Prof S S Mansouri), Denmark – 2023. 10. 14. (Saturday) 09:00 - 09:40

Process engineering requires information at various levels of granularity from the microscale to the macroscale including reaction mechanism (catalytic) and/or cell metabolic pathways (biocatalytic), reaction kinetics, reactor design specifications, transport phenomena, and interaction of the microscale to the macroscale and vice-versa. While many of these phenomena can be modeled mechanistically, engineering towards a goal of maximizing final process throughput, and other constraint satisfaction, requires tools from artificial intelligence such as search, optimization and sampling, and machine learning to model process correlations. The complexity is further enhanced due to the unavailability of data from many critical microscale variables such as metabolic fluxes, cell morphology, cell viability, etc. This is not disregarding the stochasticity in the dynamics of the individual cells and observability limitations of the process. More specifically, industries involved in the production of very large quantities (commodities, foods, etc.), suffer from low profit margin thereby making the economic /environmental feasibility very sensitive to for example (i) scale of production and thus the scale-up process, (ii) raw material prices, and (iii) energy prices.

In this talk, first an overview of challenges from discovery of novel biologics to their scale-up towards commercialization is presented. An emphasis will be made on that “discovery is different from delivery”. Next, an example of failed attempts in bringing bio-succinic acid to production scale is presented. This example indicates how early stage economic and environmental assessment and decisions made in terms of process topologies and LCA can affect the success or failure of large-scale commodity biologics. Finally, a discussion around new modalities for biologics, for example biosimilars on how to bring the costs and environmental impacts 50-80% to create market acceptance and readiness is discussed.