Carnegie Mellon University
Metro21: Smart Cities Institute  ›  Projects  ›  Clean Air & Water

Clean Air & Water

Metro21 recognizes air quality and water as serious challenges for cities and its residents. Harmful industrial pollution and automobile emissions degrade air quality and cause severe health risks for exposed residents. Old stormwater and sewage systems, as well as increasingly severe storms due to climate change lead to flooding that threatens neighborhoods and drinking water. Successful solutions marry cutting-edge technology to smart use of green infrastructure and other innovations. Sensors track how well systems are working and guide immediate action and future planning. 

Active Projects

Enabling and Sustaining Connected Communities Rooted in Solving Societal Challenges

With funding from the National Science Foundation, Metro21: Smart Cities Institute hosted an in-person workshop and a series of pre-workshop virtual listening sessions designed to elicit feedback and suggestions from experts in academia, government, nonprofits, civic organizations, and industry to identify solutions to the significant technical, policy, and socioeconomic challenges to integration and scaling of connected communities technologies.

Holistic and Energy-efficient Rural County Mobility Platform (RAMP)

Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, led by an interdisciplinary team including Metro21, and partnering with Waynesburg University & Greene County, the team aims to develop a testbed for an innovative mobility platform that can be replicated across the United States. The goal is to improve mobility in rural Southwestern Pennsylvania, with the potential to advance the fundamental knowledge of how energy-efficient, affordable mobility services can work in rural America, enabling them to be systematically planned, operated, and monitored, inherently merged with system-level modeling.

Zero Emissions Curbside Management Model to Benefit Businesses and Environment

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded a 3-year $3.8 million grant to advance zero emissions delivery, study curb use in business districts and implement technologies and policies that accelerate electric vehicle (EV) adoption by commercial fleets. Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and Santa Monica were the only three cities awarded the inaugural grant to conduct research and create models that other cities can use.

Completed Projects

Understanding the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority (PWSA) Lead Sampling Data

Compliance data from five utilities in the Pittsburgh region (including PWSA) collected from 2001 to the present have been analyzed. Results indicate statistically significant differences in years that do not differ in meeting compliance requirements, suggesting corrosion control sampling is not adequate to provide insights system-wide as expected. More extensive analysis of the broader samples from PWSA is proceeding.

Platform Pittsburgh: Air Quality Data Extraction from Images

A team of roboticists will work to develop prototype tools to estimate and visualize air quality in large-scale urban regions from digital camera data.

Evaluation of Green Infrastructure to Mitigate Sewage Overflows in Pittsburgh

The team will use sensors to determine the efficacy of three Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) installations planned for the Nine Mile Run Watershed area in the Homewood neighborhood of the City of Pittsburgh.

Air Quality Monitoring for Smart Cities: Municipal pollution targets, emissions reduction, and human health (Stage 1)

Polluted air can sometimes go undetected. And its harmful side-effects can wreak havoc on the human body. Have you ever wondered about the quality of air you breathe at home, at work, and in between? Do you bicycle to work for the exercise benefits (or want to!), but worry that it increases your exposure to air pollution? This project aims to remedy this concerns.

Center for Atmospheric Particle Studies (CAPS)

We have a simple mission. We strive to be world leaders in science, engineering and policy covering the full role of fine particulate matter in the atmosphere.

Platform Pittsburgh: Improving City Quality of Life Through City Scale Computing

As Pittsburgh becomes an increasingly instrumented city, this project seeks to harness the power of city sensors. The goal is to lay the groundwork to make it possible for researchers, businesses, local government and citizens to utilize this dramatic increase in data to develop applications that improve quality of life.

Smart Street Sweeping

The team’s project goal was to decrease street sweeping-related parking violations by 25 percent and make the issuing of the remaining tickets less of an impediment on sweeping operations.

Speck Monitors: Pittsburgh Air Quality Empowerment Lending Library

Fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, is particularly harmful to our health and quality of life. This team aims to investigate and how citizens can be empowered to understand sources of PM2.5 in their homes and take steps to improve the air they breathe.

Municipal Decision-Making and Stormwater Management in Allegheny County

The team researched best practices and generated ideas for designing and implementing a usage-based stormwater/sewer fee.

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