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Futures
Published in Paul Micklethwaite, Beyond Recycling, 2021
The Cradle-to-Cradle design protocol focuses on maintaining healthy and distinct material cycles. It seeks to design-out waste by identifying which of two metabolisms any material we use should enter at the end of a product’s life. ‘Biological nutrients’ are products of nature, which can return to natural systems for reprocessing. ‘Technical nutrients’ are synthetic products of human manufacture, which must be kept in a technical metabolism managed by us (McDonough & Braungart, 2002). It may even be possible to improve the quality of human-made technical materials, via upcycling, if they are kept within their own closed systems (McDonough & Braungart, 2013). Pollution occurs when technical nutrients enter the biological metabolism. Natural systems cannot process or safely absorb human-made products such as oil-based plastics. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch refers to an ever-increasing mass of floating debris brought together by global ocean currents. There is no single ‘garbage patch’, but constantly moving concentrations and combinations of marine debris, much of it plastic, in the North Pacific Ocean (National Ocean Service, 2020). Plastic products will eventually disintegrate when exposed to the forces of nature, but they only reduce into smaller pieces; they will not be accepted into nature’s material cycles.
Sociological and Psychological Considerations to Climate Change
Published in Julie Kerr, Introduction to Energy and Climate, 2017
Another example of the irresponsible effects of human waste is the Pacific Gyre Garbage Patch—an enormous collection of swirling marine debris in the central North Pacific Ocean. This patch, which is characterized by high concentrations of plastics, chemical sludge, and other debris, formed gradually as a result of the marine pollution gathered by oceanic currents. Researchers are still trying to determine how much debris makes up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It is not just a large collection of debris floating on the surface of the ocean, but rather debris (mostly small bits of matter) floating throughout the entire column of ocean water depth. It is too large for scientists to trawl; denser debris can sink several meters beneath the surface, making the vortex’s area nearly impossible to measure. About 80 percent of the debris comes from land-based activities in North America and Asia. Trash from the coast of North America takes about 6 years to reach the Garbage Patch, whereas trash from Japan and other Asian countries takes about a year. The remaining 20 percent of debris comes from boaters, offshore oil rigs, and large cargo ships that dump or lose debris directly into the water. The majority of this debris—about 705,000 tons—is fishing nets. More unusual items, such as computer monitors and LEGOs (a word derived from the Danish phrase leg godt, which means “play well.”), come from dropped shipping containers.
Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Environmental Science
Published in S. Kanimozhi Suguna, M. Dhivya, Sara Paiva, Artificial Intelligence (AI), 2021
Praveen Kumar Gupta, Apoorva Saxena, Brahmanand Dattaprakash, Ryna Shireen Sheriff, Surabhi Hitendra Chaudhari, Varun Ullanat, V. Chayapathy
The Ocean Cleanup Project based in the Netherlands is an initiative to extract plastic pollution from oceans, mainly the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Interceptor is a technology developed to avoid new plastic reaching the water, not only to clean up the plastic (Figure 11.4). It is solar-powered, autonomous, and remote-sensing enabled with scalability and cost-effectivity.
Human factors and ergonomics systems-based tools for understanding and addressing global problems of the twenty-first century
Published in Ergonomics, 2020
Andrew Thatcher, Rounaq Nayak, Patrick Waterson
The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2018) warns that we have twelve years to implement change on an unprecedented scale to avoid the worse effects of anthropogenic climate change on human wellbeing (http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/). We have undeniably entered the Anthropocene (Crutzen 2002; Steffen et al. 2011); the geological age where human activity has had a measurable impact on geophysical and climate systems. The widespread burning of fossil fuels for energy has led to the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide to levels that are measurably affecting climate change with even larger changes expected in the coming decades (Rosenzweig et al. 2008; Sobel et al. 2016; Steffen et al. 2018). The uncontained use of chlorofluorocarbons up until the 1990s led to serious damage to the ozone layer, the Earth’s ultraviolet filter, and there is now evidence that chlorofluorocarbon levels are increasing once more (Montzka et al. 2018). Our lack of concern for our waste, especially plastics, has led to massive oceanic garbage accumulations such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch which covers an area greater than 1.6 million km2 (Lebreton et al. 2018). Pollution now accounts for more than 9 million premature deaths worldwide (Landrigan et al. 2018). Excessive use of fertilizers to support intensive agriculture (amongst other anthropogenic nitrogen-fixing mechanisms) has resulted in the nitrogen eutrophication of riverine systems, coastal systems, and even oceans and has led to harmful algal blooms and biological dead zones (Sinha, Michalak, and Balaji 2017). There is also significant evidence that human activity is responsible for the sixth mass extinction event (Ceballos, Ehrlich, and Dirzo 2017). Climate change itself will lead to rising sea levels that will threaten coastal and island communities, droughts that will exacerbate food shortages and lead to mass migration as people move to find habitable land (Rigaud et al. 2018) and wars as people fight over resources that will become more scarce (Kelley et al. 2015). This raises the question of the role of human factors and ergonomics (HFE) in ensuring human wellbeing and effectiveness in the face of these self-made threats.