Environmental Concerns: Wastes and Pollution
Natural hazards in the environment can damage or even destroy wildlife habitats, kill or farm humans, and damage property. Some natural include: earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, avalanches, winds, dust storms, floods, wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, and tornadoes. As people go about their daily activities they produce residues and waste. These residues and waste include, urine and feces, trash and garbage, clippings and tree branches, scrap wood and metal, contaminated water solvents, excess heat, animal dung, runoff from feedlot operations, crop residues, animal carcasses, carbon monoxide, gaseous pollutants, used motor oil, mining waste, electrical power waste, nuclear power wastes, and weapons production waste. As you can see the list is very large, meaning there is a lot of waste and pollution!
There are several different types of waste, solid wastes, hazardous wastes, air pollution, water pollution, radiation, and noise pollution. Each of these groups have a source, a way to manage the waste, collect the waste, recycle the waste and dispose it.
Solid waste can be traced to four sources, mining and gas and oil production; agriculture; industry and municipalities. Mining generates about 38% of solid waste production. Agriculture makes up 51% and industrial makes up about 8%. Solid waste management involves the collection, transportation, and storage and disposal of waste by incineration or in a landfill. However now it includes source reduction, reuse of products, recycling and composting. About 80% of the money spent on waste management is spent on the collection process. The main approach is to limit its creation in the first place. Avoiding nonreusable products is key in this step.
America produces a lot of waste and we have to deal with the waste we produce, which hasn’t always been done efficiently. There are many steps to take to make sure waste and pollutants are taken care of properly. The cost is also of great concern, but waste pollution effects our health so we need to make sure we are taken care of it so it doesn’t affect our healthy negatively.
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