Waste and pollution management

Description:

Waste management is the collection, transport, processing or disposal of waste materials, usually ones produced by human activity, in an effort to reduce their effect on human health or local aesthetics or amenity. Pollution is the unintended side-effect of economic growth. Increasing industrial activity and spreading urbanization generate air emissions, pollution of waterways and increasing quantities of solid and hazardous waste, all of which have negative impacts on the environment and on populations at scales ranging from the very local to the global. Polluted water, acid rain and contamination of land can result in significant economic losses through adverse impacts on health and productivity. A key challenge for sustainable development is to break the linkages between continued growth and the quantities of pollutants discharged to the environment, by reducing the "pollution intensity" of industrial production. Pollution management, which specifically involves reducing and cleaning up pollution, is expected to be one of the fastest growing industries of the future.

Enablers:

• Governments have passed laws and set guidelines which will help set pollution standards e.g. In 1970, Congress passed the Clean Air Act, which limited the amount of air pollution that cars, utilities, and industries could release.
• Scientists and engineers have helped by developing products and processes that are cleaner and safer for the environment. For example, they have developed devices that remove harmful particles from smokestack emissions at power plants.
• Businesses are working towards finding safer ways to dispose of solid and chemical wastes. They are also reducing the amount of solid waste that ends up in the landfill by recycling such things as paper, plastic, bottles, and cans.

Inhibitors:

• Rapidly growing population
• Costly

Paradigms:

A subfocus in recent decades has been to reduce waste materials' effect on the natural world and the environment and to recover resources from them.

Experts:

Environmentalist, Governments, Scientists

Web Resources:

• [1] Waste management
• [2] Pollution Management
• [3] Pollution Management

GPS can be also used to support the investigation of hazardous waste sites, the mapping of ecosystems, the monitoring of oil spills and clean-up efforts, and the tracking and mapping of airborne pollutants.