Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Education impacts communities, which are part of the social subsystem, and also impacts
the economic subsystem by offering qualified labor. In many cases, education means higher
incomes, which allow house purchases in the suburbs that negatively impact the environmental
system in terms of land use, lost of agricultural land, environmental diversity, and distance
driven.
Food from the food company benefits the population in that humans today do not
have the burden of producing food as previous generations had; instead, humans can
pursue different interests in life, such as independent professions, the arts, writing a
topic on sustainability for the food sciences, and so on. On the down side, abundant,
inexpensive food promotes population growth that impacts the environmental system
through loss of land, ecosystems, water, and need of waste disposal. Also, like in many
developed countries these days, available food combined with lifestyles is producing an
epidemic of obesity that will eventually affect the social, economic, and environmental
systems.
A QUEST FOR THE ENVIRONMENT
A case has been made for the interrelation of the three aspects of sustainability and that the
environment is the fundamental system
that supports the social and economic subsystems.
Without a healthy environmental system, the other two subsystems will eventually come to an
end. Therefore, this topic will focus almost exclusively on the environmental aspects of
sustainability.
We, humans, have developed an economic system based on nonrenewable energy and
resources that were buried as fossil fuels and concentrated deposits of useful minerals.
We cannot ignore the fact that eventually these resources will be depleted, will become
too expensive to extract from the earth crust, or the by-products of their use will change
the global climate and disrupt business as usual. Readers interested in the other two
dimensions need to consult specialized literature on economic and social aspects of
sustainability.
NONSUSTAINABLE VERSUS SUSTAINABLE
The nonsustainable food company
To define a sustainable food company, let's first define a nonsustainable one. Figure 1.5 is a
simplified version of the food supply chain that contains the “processing facility” with inputs
of energy and raw materials and outputs of products, air emissions, wastewater, and solid
waste emissions. What makes this system nonsustainable in the long run is the reliance on
fossil fuels and nonrenewable resources in every single stage of the process. Arguments can
be made about the amount of fossil fuels left, but they are essentially nonrenewable resources.
Additionally, the resulting emissions of greenhouse gases may produce changes that may
affect the planet in unpredictable ways.
The main raw materials for food processing plants are ultimately fruits, vegetables, and
grains that are grown in the fields and used directly as raw materials to produce food products
or used as animal feed to produce animal protein, milk, eggs, and so forth. At first, a case can be
made that these are renewable resources because they are living organisms that capture energy
