Engineering Sustainable Waste Disposal after Extreme Events

Introducing SUMMEER, the Sustainable Material Management Extreme Events Reconnaissance group

Published on January 27, 2025

Until the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, was the most destructive wildfire in the state’s history. The Camp Fire killed 85 people and destroyed nearly 1900 structures. One year later, crews were still carrying away piles of wood, metals, appliances, contaminated soil, toxic household chemicals, and other debris. The waste from this single event totaled more than 3.2 million metric tons – roughly the weight of 2 million cars.

Each year in the United States, hundreds natural hazard events occur— from wildfires to hurricanes to storm surge flooding — each one leaving behind a massive quantity of waste. A U.S. National Science Foundation-supported team of research engineers is asking: How can we ensure that communities have ways to manage waste from natural hazards — sustainably?

Conducting investigations into post-event waste management is the Sustainable Material Management Extreme Events Reconnaissance group, SUMMEER. Led by Juyeong Choi of Florida A&M University-Florida State University, SUMMEER is one of eight extreme event reconnaissance organizations that fall under the NHERI CONVERGE rubric.

Since 2018, Choi and the SUMMEER team have worked toward enabling and advancing the sustainable management of post-disaster materials. (NSF CBET #2014330)

Burned-out vehicles in Paradise, CA, after the Camp Fire of November 2018. (Photos: California Governor's Office of Emergency Services)

A new framework for post-event reconnaissance

At the 2022 Construction Research Congress, the SUMMEER team presented its three-phase post-disaster reconnaissance framework to guide research on post-disaster materials management. To achieve sustainability, SUMMEER recommends that recon teams focus on the reuse and recycling of disaster materials when investigating the impact of extreme events. Each phase of recovery has specific data collection requirements.

SUMMEER’s proposed three-phase post-disaster data collection framework. Note: temporary debris management sites are designated TDMS.

Details on SUMMEER’s framework are available in the paper Toward Sustainable Management of Disaster Debris: Three-Phase Post-Disaster Data Collection Planning, in the Proceedings of the Construction Research Congress 2022.

Contributing vital data

The SUMMEER team has conducted multiple virtual reconnaissance missions, providing critical data on the types and quantities of generated debris, funding mechanisms, and the effectiveness of existing strategies. Find the SUMMEER reports in the NHERI DesignSafe Data Depot:

Tennessee tornadoes in 2020 (Data Depot project #3188)
Hurricane Laura in 2020, (Data Depot project #3476)
Hurricane Ida in 2021 (Data Depot project #4039)

The feasibility of sustainable debris management options is influenced by various factors such as the volume of debris, potential contamination, and the alignment of funding with sustainable practices.

Conclusions. The virtual investigations offered a deeper understanding of these diverse aspects in the context of past disaster events. Although the generated debris volumes were substantial, debris removal and processing in the investigated events were generally effective. However, current debris operations and guidelines primarily emphasize the rapid removal of debris from communities, often overlooking the importance of sustainable management practices. Furthermore, the absence of regional-level guidelines for sustainable debris management and the lack of recycling infrastructure and markets were identified as significant barriers to implementing sustainable practices.

During the SUMMEER investigations, the team used existing debris estimation models, including FEMA’s HAZUS-MH and EPA’s I-WASTE, to assess the feasibility of sustainable management options. However, significant discrepancies were observed between estimates produced by these models and data reported in online news media. This highlights the need for field-based data collection to accurately quantify disaster debris and support the development of more reliable estimation methods.

Guidance for an interdisciplinary community

The SUMMEER team conducted a set of workshops to assess critical data needs and recommend future directions in post-disaster waste management. Participants included engineers and social scientists from both academia and industry, and they focused on ways to facilitate the recycling and reuse of post-disaster materials in construction applications.

“Our workshops emphasize interdisciplinary collaboration among diverse fields and address multifaceted problems related to sustainable post-disaster material management,” SUMMEER PI Juyeong Choi explains. “Our community includes researchers across civil, environmental, geoenvironmental, and structural engineering, as well as social sciences, emergency management, and natural sciences.”

Choi adds, “There are numerous valuable approaches and techniques derived from our peers that can significantly enhance sustainable debris management practices. We believe that implementing these methods can foster an environment conducive to sustainable practices and enable more efficient use of recovered materials.”

The SUMMEER workshops explored a multi-faceted approach that can be applied across different types of natural hazard events. The approach includes,

investigating the feasibility of debris recycling;
understanding debris constituency and volume;
discovering the environmental hazards posed by debris;
as well as estimating costs and regulatory concerns when managing post-hazard debris.

Recommendations. The SUMMEER workshops resulted in three high-level recommendations. First, in materials science, it’s vital to recognize that post-disaster materials — “debris” — can be a valuable resource, material to be recovered and used in construction applications rather than disposed of.

Second, the construction community needs researchers to develop the advanced technologies and processes for solving hard problems like quantifying disaster debris, detecting contaminants, and finding new ways to process and recycle the post-disaster materials.

Lastly, the team recommends establishing the necessary funding, regulatory policies, and economic frameworks that will incentivize researchers — and construction companies — to find value and make use of post-disaster materials in our built environment.

SUMMEER Workshop Participants (Photo: Dennis Steers, Cal Poly)

The SUMMEER team published details on these recommendations in a 2023 paper titled Incorporating Disaster Debris into Sustainable Construction Research and Practice.

“We sincerely appreciate the valuable contributions of the participating researchers and industry professionals during the workshop,” says SUMMEER’s Choi. “The recommendations developed through this collaboration serve as an excellent foundation for guiding future reconnaissance missions, with an emphasis on post-disaster environmental sustainability.”

Informing the future

Choi and his co-PIs Sybil Derrible, University of Illinois Chicago, and Nazli Yesiller, Cal Poly, wrote a wrote a compelling argument for more research to be done in the field of post-disaster waste management. The article, “Smashed cars, burnt trees, soggy insulation: Post-disaster cleanup is expensive, time-consuming and wasteful,” appeared in The Conversation.

“In the face of climate change, sustainable disaster debris management has become increasingly critical, underscoring the need for a paradigm shift in disaster recovery operations,” Choi says. “Let’s transition from a sole focus on speedy recovery to an approach that integrates both environmental sustainability and efficiency. We hope that SUMMEER can provide the data and knowledge necessary to drive this transformative change in both industry and academia.”

For more information about SUMMEER or to get involved in post-event data reconnaissance focused on waste management, visit the SUMMEER website.