Sustainability Flashcards
What is the definition of sustainability?
Sustainability to large corporations it means staying in business and continuing to grow. Sustainability means using technology to decouple gross domestic product (GDP) from environmental damage.
Four (4) nested boxes, each presenting an approach to thinking about the environment.
1st: Pollution Control and Prevention (PC and P)
This is intervention on the scale and lifetime of a single product and is frequently a cleanup measure.
Taking transport as an example, it is the addition of catalytic converters to cars, a step to mitigate an identified problem with an existing product or system.
Four (4) nested boxes, each presenting an approach to thinking about the environment.
2nd: Design For the Environment (DFE)
The next box is that describing design for the environment (DFE). Here the time and spatial scales include the entire design process; the strategy is to foresee and minimize the effects of product families at the design stage, balancing them against the conflicting objectives of performance, reliability, quality, and cost.
Retaining the example of the car; it is to redesign the vehicle, giving emphasis to the objectives of minimizing emissions by reducing weight and adopting an alternative propulsion system - hybrid perhaps, or electric.
Four (4) nested boxes, each presenting an approach to thinking about the environment.
3rd: Industrial Ecology
The third box, that of industrial ecology, derives from the precept that we must see human activities as part of the global ecosystem. Here the idea is that a study of the processes and balances that have evolved in nature might suggest ways to reconcile the imbalance between the industrial and the natural systems, an idea known as the ecological metaphor.
Four (4) nested boxes, each presenting an approach to thinking about the environment.
4rd: Sustainable Development
The last box.
What does ecological metaphor mean and what are its 3 characteristics?
Ecological metaphor is the concept that studying the processes and balances that have evolved in nature may suggest ways to reconcile the imbalance between industrial and natural systems.
The ecological metaphor has its genesis in the observation that natural and industrial systems have cestain features in common. Consider three:
- Both the natural and the industrial systems transform resources - materials and energy - that of nature through growth, that of of industry through manufacture.
(The plant kingdom captures energy from the sun, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and minerals from the Earth to create carbohydrates; the animal kingdom derives its energy and essential minerals from those of plants or from each other. The industrial system, by contrast, acquires most of its enerfy from fossil fuels and its raw materials from those that occur naturally in the Earth’s crust, in the oceans, and in the natural world.)
- Both systems generate waste - the natural system through metabolism and death, the industrial system through the emissions of manufacture and through the obsolescence and finite life of the products it produces.
(The difference is that the waste of nature is recycled with 100% efficiency, allowing a steady state, drawing on renewable energy (sunlight) to do so. The waste of industry is resycled mush less effectively, doing so with nonrenewable energy (fossil fuels).)
- Both the natural and the industrial systems exist within the ecosphere,
(which provides the raw materials and other primary resources, acts as a reservoir for waste, absorbing and, in nature, recycling it, and providing the essential environment for life, meaning fresh water, a breathable atmosphere, protection from UV radiation, and more. The natural system manages, for long periods, to live in balance with the ecosphere.)
Name 6 kinds of renewable energy, choose 2 of them and develop in some detail.
1) Wind
2) Solar
3) Hydro
4) Waves
5) Tides
6) Geothermal
