Heath is researching the nexus between the lifetimes of consumer goods (textiles, footwear, and cosmetics), their production and end of life management, and the potential of emerging technologies in assessing the prospective environmental impacts of the design of consumer goods for safe and sustainable futures.

More information about Heath Logan

Professional experience

• Heath's research is grounded in her experience working in corporate social and sustainability reporting and consumer engagement roles within the textile industry where she learned firsthand about the importance of designing safe, sustainable, and responsible production, use, and end of life management for consumer goods. 
  
  Her research background began in the environmental sustainability efforts and reporting of companies across the textile industry while working on he MS in Environmental Sustainability at the University of Oklahoma, during this time she also earned her Master’s level certification in adult higher education with a focus on teaching sustainability concepts to students in higher and continuing education. She then moved on to complete her Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellowship at both the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and Ghent University where she earned a Double PhD in Environmental Engineering and Bioscience Engineering: Environmental Sciences and Technology respectively. Throughout her PhD and continuing post doc at DTU she focused on the importance of including additive data for robust life cycle analysis of plastics and later the material complexity challenges of textiles and footwear in the sustainable transition.
  
  Heath currently serves as a board member on the Prospective LCA Network, committee member on the ISIE Education Committee, a scientific committee member for the Plastic Footprint Network, and a board member for the Circular Futures Lab.  

Research topic

• Her work aims to advance the development of prospective LCA (PLCA) methods as well as safe and sustainable by design (SSbD) principles to encapsulate the future technologies, systems, market constraints, policy and responsible use of consumer goods. Her work hinges on real world data gathered through waste analysis, citizen studies, and field studies to understand the complexity of existing materials and how simplicity, complexity, culture, policy, and user behavior play a role in assessing the prospective environmental impacts of longevity, repairability, reuse, and other alternative strategies to linear consumption based models.  
  
  Through her research, she aims to activate and advance open-source methods and tools for PLCAs with a mind towards creating approachable and reuseable data structures to help provide access to LCA for companies, designers, and researchers around the world.