GREEN LIGHT

Environmental engineers collaborate with the city of Milwaukee to give new purpose to an urban brownfield site. GREEN LIGHT

In 2016, the city of Milwaukee began an environmental cleanup of a 3-acre brownfield site near North 31st Street and West Capitol Drive. Today, the reimagined space — aptly called Green Tech Station — captures more than 100,000 gallons of stormwater every time it rains, thanks to a green infrastructure system of 440 trees, a 20,000-gallon underground cistern, bioswales, native prairies and wetlands, and more. A long list of partners including Marquette use the site for research, product demonstration and testing, and as an outdoor classroom.

Dr. Anthony Parolari, assistant professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering, and a team of graduate and undergraduate students have set up shop at Green Tech Station to study the success of often-used green infrastructure strategies, some of which are deployed at the site itself. Team members make regular visits to the site to collect data from two dozen barrels, treated with different combinations of soil amendments, irrigation strategies and vegetation management. The end game: to uncover the green infrastructure design and maintenance practices that together add up to the most effective pollutant-removal performance. Read more about Parolari’s research on p. 24. —SARAH KOZIOL, ARTS ’92

(l to r: Andrew Hiestand, Isabelle Horvath, Grad ’20, Colin Wilson and Elaina Simms. Hiestand and Simms are civil engineering undergraduates; Horvath and Wilson are environmental engineering doctoral students.)