Ch.5 - Climate

On this week's blog post I will be covering Chapter 5 of Margaret Robertson's book, Sustainability Principles, and Practice. This chapter covers the topic of climate and inevitably climate change, in which the scientific community is at a consensus is caused by man. At the current rate that the earth is warming scientists are projecting a large influx in worsening storms, rising temperatures, and higher sea levels all around the globe. The issue is not isolated to one specific area, rather it is a global issue that must bring us all together to create meaningful solutions instead of pushing it back due to policy and infrastructure that we already have in place.

The first line that I will be highlighting from this chapter comes from page 68 in the book and talks about the fact that only a slight change in temperature of a few degrees can have lasting impacts on climate all around the globe.

"A change of only a few degrees in the global average temperature has a significant impact on the climate as a whole."

Robertson, Margaret. Sustainability Principles and Practice. Routledge, 2017.

It is quite a frightening thought that only a change of a couple degrees Fahrenheit can cause such widespread changes in our climate. We are all used to weather changes in our daily life, temperatures here in Florida can be 90 degrees one day and 60 the next during Winter. While that would constitute a change in the weather, a distinct difference from climate, which is the weather over a longer period of time. Established climate patterns are all trending upwards in regards to temperature, and in the last hundred years has already risen a few degrees, which has caused an uptick in the intensity of storms around the globe.

"Earth’s climate is warming and it is doing so at a rate that is unprecedented. The primary driver is something called the greenhouse effect."

Robertson, Margaret. Sustainability Principles and Practice. Routledge, 2017.

The warming of the planet is being driven by the burning of fossil fuels, which come from plants that have been turned into fuel that died millions of years ago and are used to power most of the things in our lives. Burning fossil fuels releases gasses that help trap heat inside the planet, like methane, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide. Currently, burning fossil fuels and natural gasses is the predominant way we move around. Most of the cars around the world burn fuel in order to move us, so there needs to be a widespread change in how we gather energy and it has to be both cleaner and renewable. Without a doubt, we will eventually run out of fossil fuels. Once we do, we need other green energy solutions in order to be ready for when that does happen.

"Since the start of the industrial era the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen almost 40 percent."

Robertson, Margaret. Sustainability Principles and Practice. Routledge, 2017.

The warming of the planet is being driven by the burning of fossil fuels, which come from plants that have been turned into fuel that died millions of years ago and are used to power most of the things in our lives. Burning fossil fuels releases gasses that help trap heat inside the planet, like methane, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide. Currently, burning fossil fuels and natural gasses is the predominant way we move around. Most of the cars around the world burn fuel in order to move us, so there needs to be a widespread change in how we gather energy and it has to be both cleaner and renewable. Without a doubt, we will eventually run out of fossil fuels. Once we do, we need other green energy solutions in order to be ready for when that does happen.

Picture credits: https://climate.nasa.gov/effects/

Ch. 14 "Waste"

This chapter in Sustainability Principles and Practice touches on the topic of waste and recycling as it relates to the concept of sustainability.  The first portion from this chapter which I found to be quite interesting comes from the first paragraph and sets the stage for the rest of the chapter that follows.

Waste is big business. Every day the average person living in the US throws away 4.6 pounds of solid waste (Center for Sustainable Systems Factsheets 2008, 1), and for every pound of household waste we discard, 40 to 70 additional pounds of industrial debris were generated during its production (Rogers 2005, 4)

This quote from the textbook is quite the figure. For every person, we produce 4.6 pounds of solid waste per day, which I think is an astronomical figure. This fact was backed up when we went on our field experience at the Lee County Waste plant and we got to see the sheer amount of trash that gets created, and eventually how it is dealt with. I think that in order to minimize the sheer amount of trash we produce drastic measures need to be taken in our lives to ease us off of that lifestyle. If it doesn't go to a landfill where it potentially can lay there for decades, it usually ends up being processed but some waste is inevitably created and left about. The most sustainable method would be something akin to what Lee County is doing with their trash. Creating energy from the incineration of the trash, while keeping the emissions clean, is a great step towards further sustainability and provides energy to many thousands of homes while putting the trash to good use.

The following line I found interesting was about the issue of Leachate, which is a liquid that forms from rainwater seeping through trash and picking up all the pollutants along the way to the bottom.

According to pollution specialists it is impossible to prevent all leaks; all landfills do eventually leak. 

(Robertson, M (2017) p.277

 Inherently, because it is impossible to prevent the spread of leachate landfills will always remain a method of trash collection that is not good for the environment. Even the best alternative, which is Waste-to-Energy incineration, produces material that is destined for a landfill in some way shape or form. Only ash is leftover but that ash needs to also be moved to its own landfill, and even the filters which clean up the exhaust air of waste-to-energy plants need to be emptied out in the same area. I think the final solution is to either launch it all into space or reduce our total trash creation (which is the more feasible method).

A reduction in total trash creation is quite a daunting task, and there are methods that we can all practice in order to reduce the total waste created. The principles of "zero waste" should be more enforced and taught in order to have a lower total trash production level. The 3R's, reduce, reuse, recycle, and possibly the fourth - "re-think" are a good way to promote sustainable waste. A larger campaign of education and reform should be implemented to further promote zero-waste.

Zero Waste begins with design. It means that products and packaging must be designed for durability, reuse, and recyclability, and the ways we live, including the ways we do busi-ness and the ways we lay out our cities, must be redesigned to minimize or eliminate the need for so many products.

(Robertson, M (2017) p.289

I agree with this statement by Robertson. A large scale change in how we package all of our consumables ranging from food, electronics, clothes, almost everything we use today comes with so much excess packaging. We should definitely put measures in place that aim to reduce the amount of packaging everything comes with ideally to nothing, but we all know that in a country such as this one we tend to buy products with our eyes before we dish over money for them. It would undoubtedly be a struggle, but I believe moving towards zero-waste should be further looked into.