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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.
Recycling and Disposal of Waste Plastics
Published in Manas Chanda, Plastics Technology Handbook, 2017
The oceans of the Earth are also not spared. According to the results of the global study released at the World Economic Forum (2016) in Davos, 8 million tons of plastics end up in the oceans each year, and it is also estimated there are 100 million tons of plastics debris floating around in the oceans, threatening health and safety of marine life. The Pacific Ocean is home to the world’s biggest “landfill”—the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which has been formed between California and Hawaii by air and ocean currents, generating a huge, slow-moving spiral of plastics debris that accumulated through decades from all corners of the globe. The plastics do not biodegrade, but they photodegrade, breaking up into tiny bits, called nurdles or “Mermaid tears,” which are reported to outnumber plankton, six-to-one, and, mistaken as food, they pose a serious threat to marine life. According to a study cited by the Worldwatch Institute, there are 5.25 trillion plastics particles weighing a total of 268,940 tons, currently adrift in oceans around the world. The economic impact of this situation, with losses in fisheries and tourism as well as cost of cleaning beaches, amounts to $13 billion per year [1]. A new report further warns that the amount of waste plastics in oceans will outweigh fish in just 30 years unless drastic action is taken.
Understanding the Environment
Published in Julie Kerr, Introduction to Energy and Climate, 2017
An extreme example of ocean pollution is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (also referred to as the Pacific trash vortex). This is an area in the North Pacific Ocean where an extremely large collection of marine debris has collected over time, caused by people tossing their litter into the water. The marine debris that it is composed of is a collection of litter that people have thoughtlessly thrown in the oceans, seas, and other significant bodies of water for years, eventually pulled to this location due to the predominant flow of the ocean’s major current patterns. The entire area extends from North America’s West Coast eastward to Japan. Within the entire region, there are actually two principal areas of trash collection—referred to as the Western Garbage Patch (located near Japan) and the Eastern Garbage Patch (located between Hawaii and California).
Thermodynamical Material Networks for Modeling, Planning, and Control of Circular Material Flows
Published in International Journal of Sustainable Engineering, 2023
Federico Zocco, Pantelis Sopasakis, Beatrice Smyth, Wassim M. Haddad
Along with carbon dioxide, other materials requiring a more efficient management are those accumulating on lands and seas as litter or marine debris such as plastic. For example, the mass of plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was estimated to be approximately 80,000 tonnes and the mass of plastic entering the ocean each year is 1.15 to 2.41 million metric tonnes (The Ocean Cleanup 2022). In terms of the life-cycle of a material, the status of ‘waste’ is at the final stage, hence waste accumulations are issues related to the end of the life-cycle. Similarly, today there are also increasing concerns at the beginning of the material life-cycle, i.e. at the stage of material extraction. Indeed, there are several materials classified as ‘critical’ by the European Union (European Commission 2020) and the United States (U.S. Department of Interior 2018) whose supply is particularly at risk. Those materials are currently required for clean technologies such as solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles, and are also used in modern technologies such as smartphones.
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.