Annual Waste

Based on my findings throughout one day of my typical school weekday, I am not overally concerned about my waste production in the course of one day....this may change after looking at the numbers after they've been crunched in a course of a year.

On Tuesday, April 22, I threw away...

One empty toothpaste dispenser
2 plastic containers for One-A-Day contacts
One Water Bottle
About 10 paper towels
A Styrofoam container for to-go food
2 plastic forks
5 cans from various drinks
Wasted about 5 gallons of gas going to and from school and little activities 

Over a course of a year those numbers would change into

About 12 toothpaste dispensers (not going through a whole one of those every day!)
730 plastic containers of contacts
About 365 plastic water bottles
3,650 paper towels
52 Styrofoam containers (don't get to-go food more than once a week)
730 plastic forks
1,095 plastic cans (Usually don't have more than 3 a day)
1,825 gallons of gas


These numbers are a little more startling...Which makes me think I may not be doing as well as I could. I could easily recycle the cans and plastic water bottles. Let's see how these numbers compare to the National average.

An average person waste about 4.3 lbs a day or about 1,569.5 lbs per year! This is 1.6 lbs more than back in 1960. About 2/3 of this waste can be composted. This means most of us, including myself are not doing their part. By just spending a little more time each day trying to recycle or not using certain wasting materials, we can all help out the environment a little more and try to reduce the waste impact we currently have on the environment.

Aluminum Fact Sheet

 

For my LCA, I will be analyzing the CD. One of the most important parts of the CD is made out of aluminum.


Aluminum is luckily the easiest metallic element in the Earth's crust! Hydrogen and oxygen forms bauxite which is then mined for aluminum. Aluminum is silver and white with a specific gravity of 2.7. A great conductor of electricity, it is very resilient to atmospheric corrosion. Its greatest quality is that it combines lightness and strength and can be used in a variety of industries. Australia creates about 40% of the world's bauxite and more than 30% of the world's alumina.

The extraction of aluminum metal takes place in three main stages. First is the mining of bauxite. Done by surface methods in which the topsoil and overburden are removed by bulldozers and scrapers, the underlying bauxite is mined by front-end loaders, power shovels, and hydraulic excavators.  The bauxite is then crushed and washed to remove the clay and sand waste and dried in rotary kilns. This ore is then loaded into trucks, railway cars, and onto ships.

The next step is refining. This involves four separate stages. First, is the digestion. This is when the finely ground bauxite is fed into a steam heated unit called a digester. This forms a solution of sodium aluminate. Then comes the clarification. This is where the green liquor is seperated from the waste. Here, waste is removed, red mud is separated out, and the remaining green liquor is pumped through filters. Then in the precipitation stage, the alumina is precipitated from the liquor as crystals of alumina hydrate. The last stage is through calcination. Here, the alumina hydrate is washed to remove any remaining liquor and is dried. Then it is heated to remove the water of crystallization.

The last step is the smelting where aluminum and oxygen in the alumina are separated by electrolysis. This happens through passing an electric current through a molten solution of alumina and natural or synthetic crolite. Periodically, the molten metallic aluminum collects at the bottom of the pot and is siphoned off and transfered to large holding furnaces.

There are many uses of aluminum. These include electrical equipment, cars, ships, aircraft, chemical processes, packaging, kitchen utensils, and industrial construction to name a few.

What is the Value of Money

The value of money is based on the idea of "fairness." Without some sort of way to establish what is the correct means to an item or service, our world would turn into chaos. The saying that money doesn't not buy happiness rings true to my ears. Some people believe that with money, you can buy your way to smiles and less worries, but the world says otherwise. Multiple movies have come out based on life experiences of people who thought this. An example that comes from one of my favorite films, "There Will Be Blood." Here, an oil man in the late 1800s named Daniel Plainview decides to drill for oil in his attempt to gain wealth. In the process of doing so he destroys many relationships including one with his own son. By the end of the movie, he sits alone in his house with no one else in it. One man with a mansion with no one else to care about.

I am not anti-money and sure I enjoy throwing around some bills when I can afford it, but what I think really matters to most people are the relationships they enjoy. A priest once told me something that has stuck with me since. Being a priest, he has been with many people on their death beds who have needed someone to talk to vent to. He says that through all his years, he has never met someone who regretted not making more money or buying new things. The things people vented to him about were about other people. Regrets, decisions they never made, calls they never took. This in the long run is what matters.

While I guess I spoke more about the meaning of life than the value of money, the value of money is just a way to reach a well-lived life. There are many roads in life people take in their pursuit to happiness. Money like everything else can help or hurt on the way. The true value of life is how you affect others along the way.

Why Athens?

When asked to write about an area of the world I wondered why it was inhabited, I thought quickly to Athens, Greece. Having been in Greece this summer and seeing multiple cities, I always wondered why Athens was chosen as the main city. I spent a good amount of time in Corinth, which is another large city, but not as large in scale as Athens. Corinth had a mountain on one side and and sea on the other, with fertile land in between. What was the appeal of Athens over a place like that?




My personal picture of the "Acrocorinth", with its fortress on the top.

After visiting Athens on my trip, I started to realize why it became such a hotbed from its earliest beginnings until now. Athens has been inhabited for at least 7,000 years and can be considered the foundations of western civilization. It first became inhabited during the Neolithic period. The main reason historians have found for this is because of the "Acropolis."
 
 The Acropolis

A natural defense settlement, historians believe that this was one of the main reasons people began to settle in Athens, along with being only twelve miles inland from the Saronic Gulf, a fertile valley area surrounded by rivers. Ancient Athens took up much less space than the modern metropolis that spans through the land now. It was only a mile long from start to finish. Next to come to help people settle in the area was the "Agora." This was the commercial and and social center of the city. As more merchants and traders began to use the Agora, the more the city grew in size and in reputation. As Greece itself started to populate through Mycenaean rule, Athens became the center of the civilization's government through its buildings in the Acropolis and its culture, through the Agora. While a multitude of other cities began to pop up and spread through the lands of Greece, Athens continued to thrive as its main city.


Athens today

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Born on January 17, 1954, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an American radio activist, political activist, and practicing attorney specializing in Environmental law. He is the nephew of the former president, John F. Kennedy and son of the former United States Senator, Robert Francis Kennedy. Robert Jr. currently co-hosts a successful radio talk show, "Ring of Fire" and is an activist in many fields. Robert grew up as a troubled child after seeing both his uncle and his father assassinated in a four year period. After being expelled from school at fifteen, Robert rebounded and up graduating from Harvard in 1976 and Masters of Laws degree from Pace University.

Specializing in environmental law, Kennedy used his expertise to work for his causes. He founded the Waterkeeper Alliance, which connect and supports local waterkeeper groups. With his efforts, there are now 191 water keeper programs worldwide operating under his organization. Kennedy has served as a Clinical Professor of Environmental Law at Pace University and currently serves as the senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, who work to expand environmental laws and restrict land use. In 1998, Kennedy created a bottled water company whose profits go to the Waterkeeper Alliance. Named "Tears of the Clouds," the company is based in the Adirondack Mountains. Kennedy has recently in the past decade been arrested multiple times for supporting differing environmental causes and concerns including the "Keystone Pipeline." In 2005, Kennedy angered many more people including environmentalists when he said, "As an environmentalist, I support winder power, including winder power on the high seas....but I do believe that some places places should be off limits to any sort of industrial development." He used examples like "Yosemite National Park." Despite his controversial actions and statements, Kennedy was named to "Time.com" as one of their "Heroes for the Planet" for helping "Riverkeeper" to restore the Hudson River.

Capitalism vs Marxism

As stated in Dressner's text, sustainability can be defined as the "non-depletion of capital." Many people who are for Marxism or through more commonly used terms such as socialism would argue that socialism's main roots come from the inability for capitalism to solve humanity's problems. Many people who think this way feel there are certain limits to the natural environment, and if we are not careful, they will be reached sooner rather than later. In the introduction of Dressner's text, it is stated that "resources have to be shared so that there is enough for everybody, both now and in the future." It then goes on to state that sustainability in this way has a lot in common with socialism. While there are many pros to maintaining resources and making sure there is enough for everyone, the are many cons to the idea also. There are higher costs associated with socialism and a bigger government influence on the people of the nation. Also, there is less room for growth with socialism with more controlled factors.

On the other hand stands capitalism. With capitalism you gain all of the perks socialism does not have with sustainability, while gaining all of its flaws also. You receive less government regulations and more room for growth, development and the eventually growth of capital. With capitalism though, there are not as many consequences of taking actions. As stated in Dressner, "a society that does not take into account the repercussions of its transformation of nature can hardly be said to dominate nature at all. While both capitalism and socialism have there pros and cons, I think what keeps society keep evolving are both working together. Because of these differing ideas, both keep the nation maturing in terms of sustainability, while bringing new and innovative ideas in other fields of thought.

Trash in Greece

Greece

This past summer I went on a "Mercer on Mission" to Greece. It was one of the most enthralling and eye-opening experiences of my life, while also being able to see all of the beautiful sights that Greece has to offer. In Greece, a group of fourteen of us including two professors worked with the local "Romani"(gypsy) population in Examilia, a small town close to Corinth. Here, we worked to help establish a school for the Romani children to help them realize there are more opportunities than the life of crime that many of their population resort to. While I could talk forever about my experiences with the Romani or the sites and culture I saw of Greece, one environmental issue that I saw throughout Examilia and actually all of Greece is their trash problem. Many of the towns of Greece do not have proper sewage systems...meaning no flushing of toilet paper. Whenever we would travel to places to visit, we'd almost always pass a huge, landfill-like mound of garbage along the way that mine as well had been a giant dead skunk the way it smelled. After doing some simple searches on the internet, I found out that trash in Greece is becoming a major environmental concern and one I am very interested to learn about.

Here's a link to an article about the issue: http://world.time.com/2013/05/28/greeces-garbage-crisis-a-stinky-metaphor-for-a-country-in-the-dumps/

A picture of Examilia: