 On behalf of the Foundation, welcome to today's webinar examining the environmental impact of exhibitions and loans using the life cycle assessment tool. This webinar is part of FAIC's professional development program meeting the needs of mid-career conservation and collections care professionals. Funding for this presentation was provided by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional funding was provided by the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation Endowment for Professional Development, which in turn is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and donations from members and friends of AIC. AIC membership dues were not used to prepare or present this event. The grant and endowment funding helps keep FAIC's programs affordable. Your registration fee represents less than half the direct costs of presenting this program. Well, before we start, I have a few housekeeping announcements. Today's presentation will be recorded and will eventually be made openly available on our YouTube channel. You will find a list of suggested readings and web links related to this program in the handout tab of the control panel that you can view or download. The questions will be collected through the questions chat box found in the control panel on the right-hand side of your screen. We will read questions out loud so everyone can hear and the panelists can respond. Most questions will be held until the end of the program, but you may post them at any time. If your webinar control panel, the section there on the right-hand side of your screen, closes, you can keep it open by clicking on the small tab in the upper right corner of the screen, and to keep the control panel open at all times, you can click on the View tab, look for the option called Auto-Hide the Control Panel, and uncheck that box. Your viewing screen, where the program slides appear, can be made larger or smaller by clicking and dragging the lower right-hand corner. Well, FAIC thanks the organizers and instructors who are sharing their time and talents with us so generously today. We will be hearing from Sarah Nunberg, a Private Objects Conservator and member of the AIC Sustainability Committee, as well as a faculty member at the Pratt Institute, Pamela Hatchfield, the Robert P. and Carol T. Henderson head of Objects Conservation at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and Matthew Echelman, who is an Assistant Professor in Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University. I now turn the microphone over to Sarah Nunberg. Thank you, Eric. Are you going to advance this slide? Can I advance it now? Okay, great. Well, thank you for coming, and I wanted to just have to advance it one more time. Eric, can you tell me one more time how to advance it? The down arrow? Should do it, or a mouse click? Okay, thank you. So just to tell you logistically how we're working, you will see, first I will give you an overview, give an overview of our presentation, and then Matthew will give an introduction to life cycle assessment, and then Matt and Pam are going to alternate between each other with each case studies. We have three case studies that we'll be focusing on today, and then I'll give a roundup of what we've talked about. On each slide, at the top of each slide are little initials, little in orange, such as for us, just don't bother with that. I'm not advancing. Eric, can you advance again? Okay. This project is based on the idea that, oops, I need to go up again. Okay, can you back one? Thank you. You're controlling it. There is a delay, so you need to give a little time for the slide to advance. Okay, so I need to go back. Okay, I'll go back again. There we are. Okay, sorry. Okay. This project is based on the idea that environmental sustainability is essential to the future of every profession. The link between fine art conservation and environmental conservation is clearly stated by Gro Brutland as early as 1987, where she defines sustainability as, and the quote on the slide, development that meets the needs of today without compromising the needs of future generations. This definition is equally applicable to conservation of cultural heritage, as we strive to preserve historic and artistic works for the benefit of future generations. And when I read this quote first, and I guess I first saw it in 2012, it really stuck with me, and with me is the importance of continuing to understand sustainability and to integrate it into my work, and to try and promote it in our work as much as possible. And that led to really the way this project began. In 2012, I attended BISO group discussions at the AI suit steaming, where there was a lot of discussion about reconsidering relative humidity range for loans in terms of how can we save energy, and there had been a lot of examination into it for saving costs, but also how much energy are we really going to save. And I had just begun learning about life cycle assessment, mostly from that, and I was wondering how can we use life cycle assessment. Maybe it would be a perfect tool to answer this question that kept being bounced around of should we reduce relative humidity, should we reconsider that range for environmental savings? Especially with more environmental issues, how much can we keep going the way we're going with using incredible amounts of energy without just running into barriers. So it's really the idea of sustaining our profession in the best way that we can work without compromising what we're doing. This led to a collaboration where I was discussing with Matt life cycle assessments and really feeling the need for an institution, a place where we can really use, have specific projects to work on, because Matt offered to do life cycle assessments with students at Northeastern University, and I approached Pam at MFA and wondered if we could use some case studies there, and she was very open to it. So it began this collaboration between environmental engineers, students at Northeastern University, and at the MFA Boston with conservators, registrars, people in lighting, carpentry, building management to come up with these, with three very specific life cycle assessments, which you'll learn about from Matt in just a minute, exactly what they are. And the project goals were to evaluate specific museum activities to identify what the most sustainable choices could be, so really helping us make educated decisions knowing what is sustainable and what's not, not just guessing, and understand the relative environmental impact of different materials that are used in museums, and also looking at our behavior. So really focusing on these ideas to get very specific answers. And life cycle assessment does that to an extent. So now I will hand it over to Matt. I'm trying to advance again. Okay, nope. I'm not getting it to advance, Eric. Oh, there it is. Oh, actually, sorry, one more slide. Specifically what we looked at were energies and materials used, looking at heating, cooling, and lighting, and loans. Specifically what we looked at was relative humidity control, transporting art, currier travel. Okay, my slide just went blank. Oh, now it's back. Packing art for travel, art treatment, and exhibition, construction for exhibition. And so all these issues were examined in three, trying to advance again, in three, that's not advancing. Okay, with three life cycle assessments. One for lighting, looking at lighting issues in a specific gallery, which Pam will talk about. Loans, how loans, materials aspect, and energy use, and environmental controls, mostly energy use. You're going to see in our questions chat box, a question just if you can think about throughout this presentation, what life cycle assessment you might be interested in carrying out, or having carried out. If you can write them in, we'll look at them later. So now I really am handing it, oh sorry, one more, sorry we can't see these slides before we advance them. There's another life cycle assessment that we did, which we're not going to really be discussing here, because it doesn't fall into the category of loans really. But it was focusing on one installation at the MFA, and Pam's going to talk, Pam can mention that later. But it was looking at using B72 in ethanol, acetone, and xylene versus xylene, and the impact of those two different treatments. But we're not going to discuss that here. So now it's Matt. This slide just takes a minute to advance. Very good. I don't know if it didn't advance for me, now it is. So hello again, this is Matt Ekelman from Northeastern University. I've been delighted to participate in this collaboration, and I'm happy to share our results and some of the concepts we learned here with you all. I'm an environmental engineer, as was mentioned here, and this was the results of three projects that my students did from an environmental engineering class here at Northeastern in collaboration with the MFA, as was mentioned. It's a great collaboration in part because the MFA is right across the street from our campus. So that really helped us get together and really share expertise. I'm going to be providing now a little bit of background on LCA, what is it, and how is it used. It's a very common tool. It's employed in engineering and other types of businesses. And it's a systems modeling tool, which means it takes a larger view of environment and sustainability. than just the object or the process that's in front of you. So I have up here the life cycle of the newspaper, and you see this fellow reading a newspaper. This is mostly how we as consumers interact with our products. We use them. We don't have a good sense of where they come from or where they go. But if you're thinking about the environmental implications of our choices, how we consume different products and how we conduct our work, the upstream and downstream processes taking place here are really vitally important. So when you're thinking about a newspaper, newspapers are produced in very large factories, and the material that feeds those factories, pulp, comes from forests that may be very far away, in fact, on a different continent. And trying to understand environment means we need to understand how these forests are managed, how these materials are transported, what types of energies are used in order to do this transformation into paper. And then when we finish with the newspaper, where it goes? Is it recycled? Is it burned for electricity? All of that matters when we're trying to understand the implications of our choices. So an LCA is an engineering model that helps us quantify the amount of energy, the amount of water, the resource use that goes into any one of these products or activities, and we can also look at other types of environmental impacts like emissions or toxicity. So LCA is used by many different sectors. Here's another abstract version of that same idea that you have both an upstream and a downstream side to all these products and processes. In some cases, we can reuse materials, recycle them, and LCA can help quantify the benefits of doing that. So the important thing to realize is that environmental impacts can occur at any one of these stages, and in many cases, those impacts occur outside of our sphere of influence and outside of our understanding. So we can reveal those impacts and emissions wherever they may be occurring. And if we want to make decisions about the best choices in materials or treatment processes, we need to consider all these stages together. What's also important is that we don't solve one problem and create another in the meantime. So we want to look at multiple types of environmental impacts. We don't, for example, make a very energy-efficient chemical that is toxic to use. So a little bit about the mechanics of LCA. You can see here an example of a product called an LMA. Let's just call it a generic product. The materials come from somewhere. They get imported into China. In this case, the product is manufactured. It's packaged, there's transport and distribution along this entire chain, and then it's used. And we count the energy and resource use and emissions that happen in each of these places. We physically go to these locations if possible and actually count energy use by looking at meters and the amount of coal coming in and so on. We then link those to a more generic information, which is called background information. This is information that tells us how electricity is produced, how steel and concrete are produced, how generic chemicals are produced, so that we don't physically have to go to all of those different facilities and count these things. We can rely on a database of information instead. We then combine these in what's called a life cycle inventory. This is like a bill of materials. It tells us how much energy in total over the entire life cycle is used. What kind is it? Is it from electricity? Is it from heat? And where is it being used? And also emissions that occur over that life cycle. So this is the resource use side of things. On the emissions front, we can then look at what impacts those emissions might have. So greenhouse gas emissions, as many of you know I'm sure, have a serious impact on climate change and greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. But emissions also cause all sorts of other environmental and human health concerns, such as ozone depletion on the ozone layer above Antarctica, ecotoxicity for toxic emissions that fall on ecosystems and plants and animals, acidification, so acid rain from certain types of emissions, and all of these different environmental impacts we want to consider in trying to make choices about what's a sustainable process for conservation and what is a little bit less preferred. So these are just some examples you see in the middle here of types of environmental impacts that we can consider. Some of them may not be appropriate for your particular situation, but in general these types of engineering models that we use are able to calculate and numerically impacts along these types of environmental impacts. Okay, so I want to spend just a little time to make sure there's a differentiation here between life cycle assessment, which only looks at environmental issues and issues of human health and what's called life cycle costing. We all know that many decisions are made on the basis of cost and costing can also be done according to life cycle principles. That's not something we will talk about here. This set of projects only focus on the environmental side and the information that comes out of these analyses are meant to be coupled to cost information to then help decision makers choose among methods that are both environmentally preferable and economically plausible. So just to remind people the three projects that we'll talk about principally, how can we better manage the loan process? What are the environmental implications of loans and the way we package loans and how we transport the whole procedure there? The second LCA focused on the lighting of both space and displays and objects specifically. And the third LCA looked at changing the set points for temperature and relative humidity and what would the principally energy benefits be of allowing more flexible ranges there? I believe we have a... Now I think we're going to do our first poll. Eric, is that correct? We're going to do our first poll. Yes, we're going to launch this in just a sec. So this is where all of you get to participate in the webinar and tell us what you think and in a second it will come up. We wanted to know whether you or your organization or ones that you work with are actively implementing decisions based on sustainable criteria. So we don't vote but you do. So if you could just take a moment to vote. We have almost half the participants have voted already. Still coming in. We're up to about three-fourths. 90%. Wow, that was fast. Going, going, going. I guess the rest are falling asleep. We'll close the poll. Oh, all but one, it looks like. I'm going to close the poll and share those results. So that's, I mean, actually quite impressive that 10% of you always actively implement decisions based on sustainable criteria. I'm very impressed. I don't know about you, Matt or Sarah, but this, I think that's pretty amazing. Yes. Okay, so can I now advance, Eric? Yep, all yours. Okay, let's see. Let me try my, oops, let me try my mouse. Did it. Okay, there we go. So as Matt and Sarah mentioned, one of the life cycle assessments that we did, which we thought was really useful and very interesting, was a very practical one. Throughout the entire museum, we have about 25,000 lights and that's gallery and other spaces as well. And I just put off a couple of pictures here of our, one of our new, not so new anymore, 2010 New American Wing Galleries spaces. And then on the right here is the space in question, which is the Lane Gallery. Lighting maintenance and energy in the building comprise about 35% of the total utilities costs for the building. And we wanted to determine whether it would be more sustainable to keep halogen lamps in this space, which has originally been designed for, or replace them with LEDs. In this particular, we use this as an example, but we were interested in applying this to a larger segment of our footprint. And in 2005, when we broke ground on this building, the lighting, the LED lighting choices were not acceptable. There was a lot of unacceptable standards, or the color rendering available at the time was really not acceptable to our designers. So we initially went with halogen and halogen-based fixtures. The housings, which were from light allier and light lab, were intended for halogen bulbs and not for LEDs. So in 2011, we decided to try using LEDs in those fixtures. We actually found that they died pretty quickly after only about six months they began to dim, and that's about 1,000 hours of use. That was a prototype bulb made by Sora, S-O-R-A-A, which our designer really loved the color rendering of. We're now onto our third generation of these bulbs, and they are better, but nothing like the 25,000 hours of use we're supposed to get from them. So we wanted to know whether it made sense to stick with these very expensive LED bulbs. They cost about $35 a piece, or whether we should go back to the halogens. Apparently, there is a lot of heat built up in these fixtures because of the way they are constructed, and so that kills the bulbs much more quickly. Let me see if I can get to the next slide. So the goal of the study, for some reason, I don't seem to have my... Do I have to click again? There we are, bulbs. So we wanted to compare and analyze the environmental aspects of the halogen versus the LED, and the students examined two possibilities. One was to replace these MR-16 halogen lamps, which you see on the left, or with the LEDs on the right, or whether we should keep the halogens and abandon the LEDs. So Matt will discuss the results of this in some detail, but these latest generation last for about 6,000 hours, which is still, as I say, far less than the 25,000 hours to last. But even though, this is a spoiler alert here, even though these bulbs continue to fail much more rapidly than they would have in the correct housings, our lighting engineers prefer them greatly because even at $35 a lamp, they save a tremendous amount of time in terms of labor and the disruption and difficulty of having to get up to these spaces with a big lift. And also, they generally all tend to go more or less at the same time, so you can replace them all rather than replacing one here and one there. So even with the minimized success rate, our engineers, our lighting engineers felt that this was just based on the labor alone a great success. Okay, so now Matt's going to speak over and talk about the results. Yeah, perhaps we should find out how many people are using LEDs at the moment. Oh, right. Let's do that. So the question is, do you use LED lightings in your exhibits already up at 65%? And just a few years ago, this was not the case at all because most people felt that the color rendering and reliability of these bulbs was not good enough. So everybody has voted, and there are the results. I'm actually surprised that it's not higher that the usually is not higher. That's interesting. And now Matt will explain why. The first task that we had in understanding the lighting options was really to nail down how long these different bulbs were lasting and try to consider, again, the upstream implications of making them, right, if you have to replace a bulb. It takes a lot of energy just to make that bulb get it to the museum, and we wanted to count all of those steps in terms of energy use. But it also matters the power rating of each bulb and its efficiency of conversion of electricity into useful light. So you can see these two bulbs side by side now. The halogen is 42 watts, the LED is 7 watts, and this is for equivalent efficacy or lumens per square meter. So this says that the LED lamp is 6 times as efficient as the halogen, and the longer those lamps are plugged into the socket and the longer they're in use, the more this number really matters. This so-called use phase of the lamp really dominates the longer it's used. You see this 2,000 hours life for the halogen. One of these LED lamps, the rated lifetime is 24,000 hours, and lamps you can buy now even have a rating of 100,000 hours, which is longer than most of us would ever stay and use the same building. However, as Pam mentioned, the lamps that were being tested at the time only had a one-tiles than our useful life. So this is what we were trying to balance in the project. The additional energy cost of manufacturing these replacement bulbs versus the energy savings in the use phase because the LEDs had a lower wattage. So I'm going to show you the results of that. What you see now are grams of CO2 equivalent. This is the typical unit we use to measure greenhouse gas emissions. So we're using greenhouse gas emissions as a proxy for energy use as an electricity generation is the main contributor of greenhouse gas emissions here. So you can see the LED lamps versus the halogen lamps. This is for one month of use. And you can see the use phase energy is really what's driving both energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. All other contributors, this yellow wedge, is the energy and emissions that have to do with manufacturing the bulbs, transporting the bulbs and installing them. And you can see it's quite minor compared with the use phase. So the fact that the LEDs are just so much more efficient than the halogens really make them a better choice environmentally rather than halogens. Now Pam mentioned that they're quite costly. They've come down in cost quite a bit since the project was initiated. But these types of environmental results should always be used in concert with cost considerations. And again, as Pam mentioned, the cost considerations of installation are also quite significant. So we found LEDs preferable both on the cost requirement and for environmental. And now we'll move to the second LCA on HVAC and coasting. So this was our trial of altering environmental controls to see what the effects might be. We all know that maintaining strict environmental control of any space is very energy intensive and very costly. So this life cycle assessment examined whether cost saving and reduced environmental impact could be attained from using the new broader environmental guidelines recently recommended for the museum environment. We had originally intended to carry out a life cycle assessment of a gallery maintaining it at 55% relative humidity plus or minus 5% versus the same gallery space maintained at 55% plus or minus 10%. However, during our first discussions with Matt's class, it became clear that unlike the analysis of the production of a newspaper, the analysis of environmental control is not as straightforward. So in the lighting and the loan studies a somewhat easier comparison could be made. But in this HVAC study, the variables gallery to gallery in a single museum might be highly significant and likewise between galleries in different museums or institutions and different climate zones could be vastly different as well. So with that in mind, we carried out a much more specific and limited study that attempted to quantify energy use and cost savings for just a limited set of parameters. So what we did was we looked at energy savings from the temporary shutdown of air handling equipment for a single gallery or single block of galleries at the MFA and we call this practice coasting. We wanted to figure out whether energy and money would be saved under these new conditions and whether the practice could be extended to other similar galleries. We were hopeful that our results might be able to be used in other institutions, but as I said, it's always a little bit questionable. You have to consider the individual nature of those building structures, the outdoor climate, and the galleries themselves and how they're used. So I think we want to do another poll right now and see whether you are involved in the process of the practice of coasting, which basically involves letting your institution, environment, you shut them off typically at night for a certain amount of time. So I'm curious to know how many of you have used or thought about using this technique. We have more than half voted already, up to 90%. Oh, everybody voted. So here are the results. So most people are familiar to some extent or another with this technique. Well, thank you, everybody. What we did was... So I'm going to move on to the next slide. What we did was we looked at this central core of the American Wing Gallery, and this is our new building that opened in 2010. Here is the central... the north and the south pavilions were not included in the study but are included in our practice of coasting. This area that is at the central core is made up of 16 zones, distributed over four floors, and it includes about 150,000 square feet. In order to gather the information for this study, data was collected from March 6th to April 4th in 2013, and the air handling system for that core of galleries was shut down every night for 12 hours between 10 p.m. and 10 a.m. So here are our air handlers, and they consist of a metal sheet enclosure, return and supply fans, an air filter, humidifier, and some control devices. During shutdown, about... it's not about exactly 50% of the supply and return fans in the air handling systems were shut off. And for this period, if the relative humidity dropped in any one gallery below 41%, or the temperature reached 77 degrees Fahrenheit or higher, the fans were programmed to come back online. So this period of the year, March 6th to April 4th, is kind of temperate in Boston, although not as temperate as it might be elsewhere. So we had the climate working somewhat to our advantage. And this particular air handling system was selected because it was the biggest one in the building, and we thought that it would produce the best tangible results for a short-term test. So the supply fan consists of 4,100 horsepower fans, and the return fans are a two-fan wall section, each of which is about 100 horsepower. And here are the fans. At the time of this study, we had to reactivate the air handlers on an average, 2.6 hours per night during the study, if at all. But at the time of the study, and this has changed a little bit, the MFA saved about $3,000 a month just by using these setbacks. So if even one of those 16 spaces hit either the upper or lower limit, the entire system would come back on. And it's important to note that we're not kind of dragging the system back from the brink of disaster over and over again. It is allowed to stay on 30 minutes after the targets are reached, and as I said, this might happen once a night or two times a night, if at all. If we know there's going to be a deep freeze or a heat wave, we don't use the setback procedure, though. So we have extended this to many areas of the museum. But again, if we see a problem coming, the system stays on, and the engineers get email alarms for every single zone that goes out of range. Okay, now this is to Matt to discuss in more detail the results. Thank you, Pam. So first a picture of these systems when you have coasting and non-coasting. If you'll notice over here, my mouse is going over the level of current flowing through the system. This is for two pieces of equipment here. You can see during coasting, one of them is essentially off. This is just a latent load here. 0.1 amps, the other is on at about 17.5 amps. Whereas if you look at the coasting example over here, both of these units are at about 30 amps apiece. So you can see, as Pam mentioned, even for the units, half of them that were still on, they were operating at a reduced load. So here are the results for the experiment for that one month in spring. And what you see here on this upper left graph on the y-axis is the direct usage of electricity. How many kilowatt hours were used that month? In the coasting example, we had about 25,000 kilowatt hours used. And we compared that with some previous information that told us if we had left the units all on in the non-coasting position, we would have used about 40,000 kilowatt hours. So this is a direct savings of 40% in electricity. And as Pam mentioned, several thousand dollars in cost. In environmental terms, there are additional benefits here. And these benefits really depend on how the electricity that powers this building is being generated. So what you see on the upper right-hand graph over here is the mix of electricity generation that we have in the New England region, the so-called independent system operator, the people that dispatch power plants in New England. And you can see this largest wedge here is for natural gas, which is a relatively clean-burning fuel. You have about 20% nuclear and only 10% or so of our electricity is generated from coal being the generation source with the most emissions, both of greenhouse gases and other types of toxic emissions. In the northwest of the United States, much of their electric power comes from hydro. And so saving energy there doesn't have the same benefits in reducing emissions as it does in a place like New England or another part of the country where there are more emissions associated with electricity generation. For the northeast, this savings that you saw on a monthly basis on the left here contributed to a decline of 10 tons of carbon dioxide equivalents, almost 40 million liters of water use, mostly for cooling and power plants, and prevented the release of 25 kilograms of pollutants that have some kind of toxicity associated with them. So we can use LCA to count not just the direct electricity savings here, but also some of these indirect environmental benefits. That actually may be larger in importance than the direct savings of electricity. So just to put this in context in terms of building energy use, the emissions that are associated with electricity and building use especially can depend on location. And again in areas with low carbon electricity, the benefits of saving that electricity are reduced because you have fewer emissions to prevent. So in the United States, buildings account for about 40% of all direct energy use, that's both electricity and heating, and so having energy efficient appliances, HVAC systems, and thermally efficient buildings can both help to reduce this number. If we can improve our buildings just using current energy efficiency technology, nothing that's on the horizon, techniques that are available now, we can reduce overall energy usage by 20 exajoules. This is an interesting unit of energy. One exajoule is approximately how much energy the city of New York uses in one year. So it's a very large amount of energy. And saving this would be about 20% of the national total. So there are a lot of energy efficiency gains that can be made right now using current technology and really what prevents that is available capital and the expertise to put these in. So if you look at how sustainability programs really get started in many sectors, not just in museums but all sorts of businesses, energy savings is one of the first things that happen because it has both a clear economic benefit and an environmental benefit. And energy is something that we usually keep track of and it's easy to measure through our utility bills. And as they say, you can't manage what you don't measure. So energy is one of those things that's more easily measured than emissions, for example. If any of you are familiar with the Greener Museums program or some of the case studies that have come out of that, many of the case studies talk about cost savings and energy savings through adjusting HVAC controls. So again, just to put this in context, LCA is designed to count both the direct energy and resource savings but also these indirect savings that have to do with upstream activities, in this case power generation, and even upstream from that how we get fuel, where our coal comes from most of it and the United States now comes from Wyoming or where our oil comes from, again, U.S. now produces most of its oil domestically and imports the majority of what is imported from, especially Canada. Okay, so now I'll hand it back over to Pam to talk about the third LCA project that had to do with the loan process. Okay, thank you, Matt. So we were also very interested in trying to evaluate the very complicated processes, procedures, and travel involved in putting together exhibitions and loans. So basically this LCA, Lifecycle Assessment, examined the carbon footprint of a loan or two loans. Collecting institutions, as most of you know, depend on loans as an increasingly important revenue source and also as part of their mandate to provide access to the collections. The MFA has a sister museum in Nagoya, Japan, so this is one of the destinations that we considered. These loans also travel elsewhere in Asia and sometimes other countries. We were interested in trying to figure out which parts of the exhibition loan process were the least and the most sustainable. So in this study we examined the exhibition gallery itself, construction associated with putting together an exhibition, exhibit case construction, creating and box preparation, sort of administrative tasks and object transportation by Aaron Truck, and we included in administrative tasks conservation as well, which was a very small part of the energy footprint of a loan. The other typical loan was by Truck to Tampa, Florida, and these would just appear as some examples. So by way of background, in 2013, the MFA loaned a total of 823 objects to 82 venues, and this comprised 100% increase over the number of loans from five years before. In 2015, and I want to thank our registrars at the MFA for pulling these numbers together for me this week, we sent a whopping 1,504 objects on touring exhibitions or as regular loans to 78 venues around the world. An additional 648 objects were on annual loan to 36 additional venues. Now those are loans that typically stay in one place for a long period of time. So that's why I separated them out here, but the grand total for 2015 is 2,152 MFA collection objects on display at 114 different venues around the world. So art packing and transportation, along with the assembly of exhibitions and this assembly of them, requires a great deal of high quality, expensive materials, often made from virgin resources, and they're very energy intensive in their production and disposal. So as I said, these two separate loans were looked at, and the loan process itself included, maybe I'll skip a little of this, just briefly. This LCA studied incoming and outgoing loans, which we based on a standard exhibition number or loan number of 30 objects. And for the purposes of this study, we assumed one object per 150 by 100 by 33 centimeter crates. So this was a gross generalization that we had to make in order to simplify this enough to do the study. We wanted to understand which parts of the loan and exhibition process contributed the greatest carbon footprint, which crate materials and construction materials had the greatest impact, and try and understand whether crate reuse would benefit the energy profile and what were the implications of travel, truck versus air. We looked at foam products, packing materials, closed and open cell foams, cardboard, hot glue, foam core plywood, et cetera. And I think now I'm turning this over to Matt again for more specifics on the results of this loan process. All right, so what you're seeing here on this slide are the results of the incoming loan. So these are the different steps once the objects arrive at your door, essentially. So on the y-axis, again, you have kilograms CO2 equivalent. So this is the unit for greenhouse gases. And the different steps that Pam mentioned, both unpacking and repacking to send out. This doesn't include the travel steps, which we'll cover later in the outgoing loan project. So you can see that the results on greenhouse gas emissions and also energy, if we showed them here, are really dominated by preparing the gallery. So this is building all of the exhibits and the trains and so on. And then exhibiting these objects in the gallery over the duration of the exhibition. We had some nice synergy among the projects here because the exhibition numbers are really dominated by both HVAC and lighting for the gallery. So those projects came together here. This is another example of using LCA to understand the trade-offs between energy use and energy used upstream to produce materials and looking at those trade-offs. So in this case, energy use during the actual exhibition, as with the lighting example, really dominated the results here. Okay, now we're going to show you results about a standard packing system. So if you look at one of these crates, what is the overall contribution of each material? And this is representative. This isn't actually exactly how you might build a crate, but we wanted to look at all the different materials that might be included for different options. So you see here the contribution of different plastics and foams, transporting the materials to actually get these materials to the museums in the form of standard plywood sizes and foam bricks was very small. Material transport was very small. Likewise, the adhesives, the hot glue doesn't show up at all. So it's this very small wedge next to materials transport. On the other hand, building plexiglass into the displays was a larger part of the results here, which again are in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. So this gives you a sense of which materials that go into these packing systems are really dominating and which ones you might want to identify to look at lower intensity materials if available. Okay, so again we have these crates systems that we just evaluated, and the contribution of plexiglass in particular is really being a target for either substitution or reuse and that we can lower impacts by reusing many of the materials that come with the crates or that are in these displays. So what I'll show you next here is the impact of reusing some of the materials here. So if you use a crate once, you have greenhouse gas emissions on the left here. If you reuse them the crate four times, the impacts of producing the crate itself are essentially divided by four, because you don't have to make those materials and assemble them into a crate. However, the reuse of the crate doesn't do anything to prevent emissions from the display, the exhibition, or any kind of transportation that's taking place. And this has to do with when you look at a total loan that goes out from a museum, which is the subject of the next slide. So if you consider an outgoing loan, so preparation, transportation of both the objects and any couriers, and then registration on the other end, these are the results that you see here. Again, y-axis is the same. Kilograms here too. So this shows you that the transportation is really dominating the results here, both the transportation of the crate and the transportation of the courier. In fact, the courier is a larger contribution here because the courier has to make two trips both on the way out as the loan is going out and then as it travels back or wherever its next destination might be, the courier will again fly out. So two round trips instead of one here. Going to Florida by truck, the objects may go by truck, and so you see a very small contribution there in this third wedge, but still the courier may fly. And so the actual mode of transport for the arts didn't have that large of a reduction to overall emissions of the outgoing loan. Okay, another interesting aspect of this study was to look at how many people would view these objects that were out on loan. And this really was driven by some of the standards in life cycle assessment that tried to use units that are functionally equivalent, that are really related to the function of the arts. So we had many discussions about what's the function of a museum loan. And one that we generally agreed on was the number of people who would be able to view an object. And so if we're sending a loan to a place, to a museum that has a very high membership or viewership, that the impacts of sending that object there would be divided by more viewings, essentially, and so be proportionately less. This is a kind of engineering mindset that you want to somehow quantify the value of these loans in a numerical way. And so it may not be appropriate to every situation here, but it helps put the numbers that we can compare. So in Florida, now you're seeing these expected number of views in the second column here. The museum in Tampa had a lower viewership than the museum in Nagoya. And so if we divide the total emissions here by the number of views, even though the total emissions of sending the loan to Japan were much higher than sending them to Tampa, the per view emissions were substantially less, which you can see in the third column here. But this is just a comparative way to quantify the results, again, for those who are interested in using those kinds of metrics. Okay, so those are our results and our studies. Three years later, it's been really interesting to see how that's gone and Pam discussed how the lighting studies were used and that they're continuing to coast and even more so and using and reusing crates. We've looked at how we can continue to distribute our findings and you'll find in JAIC next month. I think it's next month that our article, we wrote all of this up so you'll find that published. We've also begun to look more at how the courier can be reduced and what we can do with courier travel, which was really the worst, the highest part we found of a carbon footprint. And I don't know, a lot of people may, I hope people found our courier survey and have filled it out through the AIC and we'll be looking at those results to try and make some suggestions as to more reductions. We have looked a little bit at some of the initial results and people are sharing couriers, which is a great way to reduce courier travel, mostly for reducing costs within larger institutions and somewhat between institutions as well. Not much hiring outside contractors to represent a bunch of museums. So some of the initial results, a lot of people are taking courier trips, although people are really sharing the travel. So another interesting thing that we found was that not many objects are being hand carried. So really, can we think more about what is the role of the courier and if we reevaluate that, maybe we can see reasons to reduce that travel. Oops, sorry. So further actions, if we can educate people more about the life cycle assessment results that might help to reduce our carbon footprints. Also examining other issues, so we are interested in what you think of what there might be more issues to study and with the courier really promote sharing between within institutions. And one thing we have been thinking about is there is some sort of courier network we can set up where couriers are available to receive objects, but not necessarily travel directly with the objects. And maybe those are ways that we can really reduce travel. So that's our presentation. We'd like to thank FAIC for having this webinar to get out some more of our information, especially Eric and Abigail. Northeastern University for doing life cycle assessments, especially Matt's students. The MFA for allowing us to have a case study there, which were just invaluable for this study. Specifically Matthew Siegel, Craig Dettering and Scott Sina. So thank you for your attention. And thank you to our presenters. We're now going to open things up for questions and you can enter those into the question chat box in your sidebar. And Abigail, do you have something to kick us off? Yes, I have one where the question was asked on slide 23 of 47. I'm not sure if you're able to pull that up. But the question was, what about disposal, cost, environmental impact? This is Pam. That's about the bulbs, right? That's correct. My understanding, yes. Matt, maybe you can address that, but this life cycle assessment intends to look at all parts of the life of that object from what they say is from cradle to grave. So that would have been included in the study. Yes, and indeed it was. It was too small to really show up in the results here. And I just want to remind people that LCA is most useful when it's done in a comparative fashion. In this case, both halogen and LED lamps will go into essentially the same waste stream. It depends by state how that's classified. Sometimes it's normal municipal waste. Sometimes it's universal waste. And then the impacts, what happens to those bulbs, very few of those would actually be recycled for any recovery of the materials inside, although we're, as a society, trying to get better about managing electronic waste. So the short answer is, one, the disposal phase doesn't contribute much to emissions because these are primarily not things that decompose and let off carbon in landfills, and they don't burn so there's no emissions from incineration. And also, they were very similar in profile between the two lamps. Okay, great. We have another question from, let's see here, from Stephanie asking, I thought one of the selling points for LED lighting is that it does not generate heat. Can you please address how the LED lamps got hot enough to shorten the life of the lamp? This is Pam and Matt, I hope you'll comment on this more specifically if you can, but in general, my understanding is that the LED lamp generates heat at the back of the fixture and these fixtures are not vented at the back, whereas halogen produces a tremendous amount of heat out the front of the fixture, which is why they don't need to be vented in the back. And Matt, maybe you can give us some more specifics about that. Sure, just one thing to note is that there's always going to be some heat production because any conversion of energy involves some type of loss. So while the LEDs are certainly much more efficient at converting electricity into light, they're not perfectly efficient. And so there is some heat production. If you can see or remember the image of the LED lamp, you saw the backside of it is this large gray mass. That's a big hunk of aluminum and that's meant to be a heat sink to allow heat to radiate out the back, as Pam mentioned. But the biggest reason that LEDs fail due to this thermal degradation is that they're very sensitive to heat in a way that halogens or incandescent bulbs are not. And LED is essentially manufactured the same way as a computer chip and just as you are admonished to keep your computers in cold places and don't bring them out into the sun or bring them to the beach if you can avoid it because that kind of electronics performs less well in warmer weather. The same is true of LEDs. They're much more sensitive to higher temperatures than either of the other two lamp types. Thank you, both Matt and Pam. Matt, we have another question for you from Hildegard asking, is there a database with results of the sustainability of single materials that you investigated and if so, is it publicly available? Yes, there are several databases around and I'm not sure of your location, Hildegard, but several countries including the U.S. have national databases and these are called Lifecycle Inventory or LCI databases. The ones that are nationally compiled are typically open to the public. There are also databases that have been compiled in domain areas. So there's one for building materials, actually collaboration between some LCA software providers and Google and some other companies. This just came out with a database of 100 commonly used materials that's called Quartz and that's just been made live. So unlike the situation, maybe even five years ago, there's many more available databases than there used to be available, freely available and the quality is improving because we're collecting more and more data from the district directly. Great, thank you, Matt. And we will try to send out links to many of these resources to all of the participants later on. This question is for everyone from Samantha. Is it possible to carry out an LCA oneself, particularly for the environmental impact? Is an engineer needed to walk through this process? And where do you suggest finding an engineer to help with this? Well, I would say give me a call. That's essentially how it worked with this project and many educators in this area are always looking for real projects to collaborate on with their students as an educational exercise. So for all of the attendees of the webinar, please feel free to contact me. I can finish this up there. Again, many countries have their own national labs that have LCA practitioners in them and it's their job to field questions from the public. And as for online tools, it is certainly possible to conduct your own LCA's and it really depends on the domain. If you get into obviously more complex assemblies, especially electronics, it's much more difficult to find the kind of built-in information that you might want. Where it really helps to have some practitioner expertise, doesn't have to be engineering, but basically people who are in the profession of environmental modeling is interpreting the results and understanding the trade-offs among these different types of resource use or environmental impacts. That's something that's often hard to understand or have an intuition about when you're doing this for the first time. Okay, thank you, Matt. We have another question. This one's from Steven. Is there analysis on the disposal of drywall versus wood board, e.g. plywood or medite? I'm not sure if I'm saying that correctly. Well, I can say I'm not sure if the question is regarding disposal from museums or disposal in general for both Pam and myself are located in Massachusetts, and it is now illegal to dispose of wood waste directly into Massachusetts landfills, so we don't have any plywood going in from commercial sources or institutional sources there, but we do have wall board or other types of wall building materials, non-wood. Okay, great. Thank you again, Matt. Okay, this one's for everyone, so feel free to chime in, Sarah and Pam, if you have any thoughts on this one. Where is the low-hanging fruit? Do we start with HVAC, lighting, or couriers? Where do we see the most impact on the typical museum or other collecting institution? This is Pam, and I think, correct me if I'm wrong, both of you guys, but I think that we would start first with lighting. It's probably the simplest and reaps the greatest benefit the quickest, so that would be my take on it. Matt, I'd be interested to know what you think. Have we lost Matt? Oh, yes, I think I missed the question. I'm sorry. I can ask it again. It's generally, what's the low-hanging fruit? Where should you start if you're choosing between HVAC, lighting, or couriers? Where is the biggest impact on typical museum or collecting institution? I suggested lighting, Matt, but you may have a different opinion. Well, to do this in a very structured way, typically the cost is really the thing that is driving a lot of these decisions, and so many institutions that we work with, not just museums, but many kinds of businesses, they look at energy-saving potential versus cost of the investment. Maybe it's investment in lighting or investment in new equipment. Coasting is really nice because it doesn't really require much investment other than reprogramming some of the HVAC system and then just making sure you have protocols to pay attention to it. So in terms of energy efficiency as a function of cost, I would say that coasting is the first target. I have to say about the couriers because I've been looking at the courier survey results, and I don't think that's the low-hanging fruit. I think that's going to be a much bigger issue. I think if one institution or one small group could... you could address it yourselves, but nationally I think that's going to be not a low-hanging fruit, a much more challenging issue. Okay, many thanks. Actually, on the point of couriers, we have the follow-up from Hildegard. Hildegard had earlier asked about the database with results of the sustainability that Matt was speaking about. She followed up by asking, one of my services is couriering international loans. My idea was to minimize cost for institutions and energy-saving. However, my experience is that there is a lot of hesitation of the institutions out of... I ask myself if institutions of one country can share couriers, why not give it over to conservators in private practice with more proven expertise and experience working in the country a piece of art is traveling to. Does anyone on the panel have any feedback or thoughts on Hildegard's idea? Well, Hildegard, that is...this is Sarah. This is exactly what we are trying to research through a courier survey of would institutions be open to this, possibly creating something called maybe a courier network. And I know we need to stay away from the term training or being licensed. But to try and figure out a way where people could really have specific training and be qualified to meet objects instead of travel with them. From the survey, it doesn't seem as if institutions are very interested in that. Institutions are interested in reducing costs, it seems, and are beginning to share couriers. I guess Pan can also talk to this as well. I think there's a lot of hesitation about and probably legal implication about or to allowing people not... who are not representatives of the institution responsibility for objects. I think it's a very complicated process to wade through that. I'm happy to speak further with our registrars about their ideas. But I think this is very complicated by insurance companies as well. It's a huge task to try and sort through for this purpose. It was interesting in the survey. There was really just one or two people responding saying that insurance companies...what was holding it up and the hesitation based on insurance companies. So that was interesting. I expected a lot of response about that. So that was just interesting. Okay, thank you. I think Eric says that we might have a poll is that right? Well, I think I'll hold that. I think we have some questions from Linda and Wendy. We should take care of those first. Great, great, great. All right, this one is from Linda. She asks, do you have any recommendations for recycling plexiglass? So this is Matt. Rather than recycling, I would say re-use of plexiglass in your institution or depending on your situation is an even better option for recycling or sending them back to a shredder and re-melter. It really depends on the market price of oil and if prices are low, recyclers generally don't want to buy re-used materials for recycling. So as much re-use as you can do locally is really the best option if you can do it. Okay, great. I think we've got one last question and then a poll. The next question today comes from Wendy. She asks, are there caveats that need to be considered, especially with respect to HVAC and coating? Not all museum envelopes and systems can allow for coasting, my apologies, because they may not have the inherent buffering capability due to construction. Yes, that's very, very true and so that's why we tried really hard to qualify those results. We're not certain that that is really applicable to other institutions or other people's situations. So that has to be carefully studied and examined on a case-by-case basis, I think. Especially the wear on the equipment as Pam mentioned, just having the equipment come on once wasn't an undue burden on a lot of these fans and blowers, but if you have an envelope that isn't as thermally efficient and the fans come on and off and on and off once the environment drifts out of the allowed range then that'll really wear down the equipment faster and then you may have to replace the equipment sooner than you would have liked and that has its own energy penalty that's associated with it, so with all of these results it very much depends on the site, but also again the location of where the energy is coming from and how the electricity is generated. I see Wendy was also curious about the extreme environmental conditions, deep winter and height of summer, and I think Pam you already said that you did not do the coasting during extreme temperatures, is that correct? Right, if we think there's severe weather coming we don't go to the coasting. Well I guess we're kind of wrapping up but if we did have a poll I wanted to see how well we may have done with our presentation and just wondering are you more likely now to consider sharing or doing other situations with your couriers? And we've got about a third of the people have voted already about three fourths and for some people this question isn't applicable and we realize not everybody is associated with an institution that does loans I think we're just about ready to close this. A couple people haven't voted but we're going to close anyway here and whether this is a change of view we don't know but it's certainly encouraging that so many people are at least considering changing their career policies. Is this a surprise to any of our panelists? I think the probably line is probably and maybe are probably the most reflective of the general thinking on this. I think a lot more information is needed. We need to talk to a lot of people about how feasible this really is and how one would go about developing such a program. So when we had our survey out for just about two weeks 37 people had responded. So we have another couple weeks and we're sending it out to more people so hopefully that information will help begin this. Great. Well on behalf of FAIC I wanted to thank Sarah Nunberg, Pamela Hatchfield and Matthew Echelberg for sharing their expertise with us today and thanks also to the AIC Sustainability Committee for organizing this webinar series with your financial support. And we would like to ask you all to do two things to help make programs like this possible. First, please fill out the evaluation form that you're going to be receiving by email shortly. Your feedback really does help us evaluate the workshop and improve our future events. And second, at least consider a donation to FAIC. Your contribution is tax deductible such as these along with scholarships for those needing financial assistance to our live workshop programs. And we're going to be sending everybody participants and registrants a link to the recording of this program. And we thank you all for being here and hope you have a great day. Thank you all.