Ch 8.3, 8.4 - Human system and resource use

8.3 - Solid Domestic Waste

• Solid Domestic Waste (SDW): or municipal solid waste is the trash, garbage, rubbish from residential and urban areas which we produce. This is a mixture of paper, packaging, dust, glass, metals, plastic, and others. This waste is different from other waste due to the fact that even though it is collected from homes and shops and makes up around 5% of total waste, we are able to control that waste

• There are different types of SDW of which is the volume and composition changes over time

• Types of SDW:

  • Biodegradable: such as food waste, paper, green waste
  • Recyclable: glass, paper, metals, plastics, clothes, batteries
  • Toxic: pesticides, herbicides
  • Medical: needles, syringes, drugs
  • Mixed: tetra packs, plastic toys
  • Waste electronic and electronic equipment: TVs, computers, phones, fridges
  • Waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE): is a term from the european community.

• The abundance of non-biodegradable pollution in particular has become a major environmental issue

• The Circular Economy: we find the raw materials or natural capital (take) as we use energy to produce goods (make). These goods either break down or get replaced. Our economy is built on sustainability, which indicates that our resources are finite, and will eventually run out, no matter how much we decrease the usage of fossil fuels. Waste disposal options include landfill, incarceration, recycling, and composting.

• It is a sustainable model which aims to:

  • Be restorative of the environment
  • Use renewable energy sources
  • Eliminate or reduce toxic waste
  • Eradicate waste through careful design

• There are many varieties of strategies that can be used to manage SDW influenced by cultural, economic, technological and political barriers. Economies depend on goods and these require raw materials. These include:

  • Altering human activity: includes reduction of consumption and composting of food waste
  • Controlling release of pollutant: separate waste into different types, legislate about waste separation, educate for waste separation, tax disposable items
  • Clean-up and Restoration of Damages Systems: reclaim landfills, incinerate SDE for energy, collect plastics.

• Managing SDW:

  1. Strategies to minimise waste: These can be summarised into the three R’s, reduce, reuse, recycle.
  • Reduce: Means to use fewer resources and to stress Earth’s resources less. Some examples of this include: purchasing items with less plastic packaging, buying products made from recycled material, avoiding imported products, being mindful of the resources being used in your home
  • Reuse: This is where the products are used for something other than their original purpose, or they are returned to their manufacturer and used once more. Examples of this would be Reusable bottles, composting of food waste, reusing old clothes as cleaning rags, reading e-books instead of physical books
  • Recycle: This waste is converted into reusable material. This includes recycling bins in homes, charging households more if they produce more than the standard amount of waste, producing little food waste (feeding leftovers to dogs for example). Recycling involves collecting and separating waste materials and processing them for reuse, if the materials are reused without processing in some way, this is called reuse
  1. Strategies for waste disposal:
  • The other forms of waste disposal are landfills, composting, and incinerators, however, if waste is not disposed through these forms, waste is thrown in the sea or composted into organic waste. Landfills are the main method of disposal, where it is taken to a site and buried there, and hazardous waste can be buried with everything else and and the initial cost is cheap.
  • Incinerators are able to burn the waste at high temperatures up to almost 2,000 degrees celsius. Waste is pre-stored to remove materials which could be recycled instead of burned, and to remove incombustible materials as well. The heat produced from incinerators is used to generate steam to provide electricity to areas such as turbines or to heat buildings. This process is called waste-to-energy incineration.
  • Anaerobic digestion is when biodegradable matter is broken down by microorganisms in the absence of energy. Methane produced here can be used as fuel. While domestic organic waste can be composed or put into anaerobic bio-digesters. Composting is as easy that it can be done at home. Anaerobic digestion is able to break down waste and produce methane, which is used as fuel and digestate that is used as a fertilizer.

8.4 - Human Population Carrying Capacity

• Carrying capacity: maximum number of species or ‘load’ that can be sustainably supported by a given area

• Difficulties in Measuring Human Capacities:

  • Humans use a greater range of resources than any other animal, therefore, measuring human carrying capacity requires more than just understanding what we eat and drink, and the space needed for housing.
  • We are able to substitute some resources with others, such as using coal instead of wood. However, this depends on our lifestyle as depending on our cultural and economic situation, our usage of resources also varies.
  • We are also able to import resources from their environment, and the way it’ll react depends on its geographic position, which is why we cannot just look at its local environment to see how many people it can support.
  • Developments in technology are able to change the resources we use, this means that machines become more efficient or it means that we use more resources as we can exploit new ones.

• Ecological Footprint (EF): Human beings have enormous impact on natural environment, and ultimately on each other. The way we function and treat Earth’s resources determines and effects the long term availability of those resources and also the well-functioning Earth systems such as climate change, hydrological cycle, and other nutrient cycles in the atmosphere.

• Ecological Footprint can be increased by:

  • More reliance on fossil fuels
  • Higher usage of technology (it can also decrease footprint)
  • Large per capita production of carbon waste (high energy and fossil fuel use), and large per capita consumption of food

• Ecological Footprint can be reduced by:

  • Reducing use of resources, Recycling resources, reusing resources
  • improving efficiency of resource use, reducing amount of pollution produced
  • Transporting waste to other countries to deal with
  • Improving country to increase carrying capacity
  • Importing resources from other countries, reducing the population to reduce resource use
  • Using technology to intensify land and increase carrying capacity

• Personal ecological footprint:

  • A fair Earthshare is the amount of land each person would get is all the ecologically productive land on Earth were divided evenly among the present world population
  • A person’s geographical location affects their measure of sustainability, as individuals in MEDC’s usually tend to have a technocentric view, in which people increase their consumption of resources in the expectation that technology will replenish these resources and decrease the harmful impact on the environment.
  • Individuals in LEDC’s tend to be ecocentrists, who try to reduce their use of non-renewable resources to decrease their use of renewable ones. People in LEDCs do not extra resources to waste, which is why they opt to decrease their personal usage of resources.