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What is Environmental Impact?

What is Environmental Impact?. Module Objective. Having read this, you should know the following: Basic definitions and notion of environmental load and impact Real life examples of impact. Environmental Load versus Impact.

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What is Environmental Impact?

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  1. What is Environmental Impact?

  2. Module Objective Having read this, you should know the following: • Basic definitions and notion of environmental load and impact • Real life examples of impact

  3. Environmental Load versus Impact • There is a difference between “environmental load” and “environmental impact” • Environmental Load: A loading is put on the environment, e.g., by removing trees or water, or dumping waste. • Environmental Impact: The load is actually causing a change in the environment. • Typically, environmental impact is negative, but positive impacts can also occur. • Note the similarity with mechanical loading, stresses, strains, and failures

  4. Measuring Environmental Loading and Impact Most design researchers (and practitioners) agree that: Technical systems convert matter, energy and information into more useful matter energy and information. However, unwanted consumptions and emissions of energy, matter (and information) occur as well. Because of the diversity of opinions, a unifying measure of environmental load and impact (for engineering purposes) does not exist. Environmental impact is caused by matter and energy consumption and emission throughout products’ life cycles.

  5. Environmental Load & Impact - How bad is it? • How much waste do you think we generate? • You as a person? • The USA as a society? • The USA industry? • How much CO2 do you think a refrigerator produces? • How much impact do you think computers and the internet have? • Other examples?

  6. Municipial Solid Waste (MSW) • Municipial solid waste (MSW), that is, your trash, averages 4 pounds per person per day. • The USA generated 180 million tons of MSW in 1988 • One third of US MSW consist of packaging materials. • Can you understand why Germany has made a packaging law? • The European Community’s annual waste output (including packaging) is estimated at 2.2 billion tons. • The amount of the EC’s packaging waste is estimated at 50 million tons with 9 million tons being recycled to a different extent in the Member States.

  7. Industrial Wastes • U.S. Industry, on the other hand, generates • 700 million tons of hazardous waste, and • 11 billion tons of “non-hazardous” waste.

  8. The US in Context...

  9. Graphs can be misleading...

  10. Traffic Impact In the Federal Republic of Germany, the transport sector accounts for • 75 percent of the carbon monoxide emissions • 60 percent of the nitrogen oxide emissions • 50 percent of the organic hydrocarbon emissions • 20 percent of the carbon dioxide output • as much as 26 percent of end-point energy consumption. The approximate 3 million inhabitants of the metropolitan Atlanta area drive 100 million miles per DAY!

  11. Refrigerator Impact • In the course of its service life, an average three-star refrigerator consumes roughly 5,000 kilowatt-hours and produces about 2,400 kilograms of CO2 (a Greenhouse contributor) • An assessment of the entire product line of a refrigerator - ranging from the extraction of raw materials to the disposal of the used product -shows that the lion’s share of this energy (90 percent or more) is consumed during the refrigerator's period of use.

  12. Computers and Energy Consumption • If the number of workstation computers continues to grow as it has in the recent past, a new power plant will have to be built every five years in order to cover the increasing electricity consumption in Germany. • While the computers' specific energy consumption per processing transaction is decreasing, this development is offset by the greater computing power of the new machines. • According to calculations made by the World Watch Institute, all the computers operated worldwide consume as much energy as all of Brazil during the same period of time.

  13. The Internet and the Environment • The internet is also having an effect on the environment. • A 1990s news story indicated that a one-story “server farm” consumes as much electricity as a 20 story office building. • Can you name some other impacts?

  14. Paper • Each German citizen consumes about 200 kilograms of paper per year, while the per-capita consumption in China, for instance, is only 13 kilograms.

  15. So what? • What did you learn from these examples? • Where did most of the environmental impact occur? • How would you reduce it?

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