- by Benjamin Wright -

Christos Athanasiou is determined to make life in space as sustainable as possible. After all, getting new materials into space is difficult, energy-intensive, and expensive, so it makes sense to reuse and repurpose as much as possible. Applying the principles of a circular economy in space makes a great deal of sense. But Athanasiou doesn’t want to stop there. If you accept the premise that life in space can be sustainable, why wouldn’t you aim for the same goal on Earth?

Athanasiou, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering as well as a faculty fellow at the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS), is calling for the development of a circular, sustainable economy that can be implemented both in space and on Earth in alignment with the United Nations sustainable development goals, particularly goal 12: Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.

Athanasiou and his students are developing a framework to revolutionize the testing and evaluation of the mechanical behaviors of sustainable materials. By replacing complex finite element simulations with user-friendly analytical formulas, their approach enables faster, cheaper, and more accessible fracture and fatigue testing. This innovation, just published in the Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids, is particularly crucial for sustainable materials, which often have unique and unconventional properties. By extracting reliable insights from minimal data, the framework allows researchers to directly extract physical laws from datasets, opening the door for the broader adoption of greener composites in construction and manufacturing. His efforts in this area have earned him a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award.

Building on this work, Athanasiou and his team are advocating for the democratization of mechanical testing and engineering standards with the help of AI. As he and his colleagues point out in a recent article in the Journal of Applied Mechanics, making low-cost testing available to a wider range of manufacturers and material suppliers is a key step in decentralizing the supply chain for recycled and repurposed plastics and other materials used as feedstock in a circular economy. By addressing the regional nature of supply chains for recycled materials, decentralized standardized testing can accelerate the adoption of these sustainable feedstocks, ultimately reducing the carbon footprint of the entire manufacturing process. Part of these efforts are supported by a Federal Aviation Administration grant that Athanasiou and colleagues were awarded together with the City of Atlanta’s Department of Aviation.

As an educator and engineer, Athanasiou wants to see more of his colleagues step up and make sustainability part of their curriculum and research.

“As engineers, how can we use our expertise to meet sustainability goals, and how can we use our positions to incorporate sustainability-centered thinking into all that we do in our research and our classrooms?” he asks. “It is important for us to find a way to do this, as sustainability will be one of the biggest challenges for young engineers of the future.”

Athanasiou sees a lot of promise in this area, especially at Georgia Tech.

“I think that BBISS will have a very critical role in this area, working across disciplines to instill a sustainability focus in all of our engineering curricula. We need to design processes, systems, and materials to be resilient and design for the long term in a society that does not think that way.”

Athanasiou sees many barriers to adoption standing in the way of establishing a sustainable circular economy — a lack of engineering understanding by policymakers, a culturally ingrained resistance to change, and a general societal skepticism of sustainability efforts.

“We need to properly educate the public on what is possible and how it can help them as individuals.”

Financial motivations are also a major barrier. With so many products designed to become obsolete and replaced, convincing corporations to give up future sales in the interest of making a better world is a challenge.

“There have to be financial incentives for this to happen,” says Athanasiou. “New markets will develop, but they have to make economic sense or change will not happen.” He would like to see companies shift to products with easily swappable parts, low-cost testing, and green construction approaches in everything from electronics to building construction.

“Sustainability and enabling circular economies are not the responsibility of a single actor. It's a coordinated effort between scientists, engineers, policymakers, businesses, and community members of all backgrounds working together.”

One of the challenges, as Athanasiou sees it, is making sure the policies and science are ready at the same time so policymakers don’t overpromise on what is scientifically possible and researchers don’t waste time and resources on solutions that policymakers don’t have the mandate to implement.

“All of these communities need to be talking to each other all of the time. That is the only way for us to move forward to a circular economy.”