The ecosystems of the world depend on fish heavily. Whether it be in underwater food chains, or
above ground food chains, we need fish.
In many countries around the world, fish are the main source of protein. Even here in the United States, we eat a ton
of fish. Sometimes we don’t even know we
are eating a fish product, whether it is in fake crabmeat, or other
products. But point of this being we as
a planet need fish. They play a huge
role in aspects of industry, farming, and the ecosystem. While it may shock you to find out that
humans are absolutely decimating and contaminating fish populations around the
world. We are overfishing our seas and
lakes almost to the point of no return.
And it is important to note its not just fish either. We are also over harvesting crabs, shrimp,
etc. Despite mildly strict fishing
regulations in the US, we are still taking out too many fish. So you can only imagine the extent of that
problem with little to no harvesting regulations in those countries. And because many fish have very large
migration patterns, spreading from continent to continent even, this hurts fisheries
around the world. This demotivates
country to protect their fish. Why
should they not over fish them and miss out on revenue, just to have another
country take advantage of that. It’s a
sense of if you don’t take it, someone else will. And this is not the right way to go about
taking care of our natural resources.
And the fish that are left, well they are not all necessarily
healthy. We are polluting our oceans at
an alarming rate as well. And these
chemicals are being absorbed by our fish.
The nuclear reactor melt down in Japan for example, killed millions of
fish and contaminated even more. Some
predatory fish can get increased levels or chemicals like mercury by eating
smaller organisms repetitively. And
aside from other fish, only one organism consumes more fish, and that is
humans. So those chemicals that we are
putting straight into our oceans are ending up right back in our bodies. It’s a sort of “pollution karma” if you will. And some populations of humans eat more fish
than others; therefore having higher concentration of chemicals in them. Asian countries like Japan eat fish at an
alarming rate. And some of those fish
are not caught to far away from the location of the nuclear melt down. Scientist have went into these local fish
markets and actually tested the tissue of fish for sale. And the results were not so comforting;
chemicals were found in high levels in fish tissue. This was especially prevalent in larger
predatory fish, like the blue fin tuna for example. But this isn’t unique to Asia by any
means. Lake Erie has elevated mercury
and other chemical levels in its fish too.
The EPA recommends that fish coming from the Ohio shore of Lake Erie are
eaten no more than once a month. Other professional
regulations say that it should be even longer than that, especially in
predatory fish like the walleye. The
world needs to take action and help protect our fish, because in the end, it is
a matter of protecting ourselves.
In the United States and around the world,
hundreds of thousands of industrial processes are taking place everyday. This has been going on 24 hours a day, 7 days
a week, since the industrial revolution in the United States. In the United States we really do produce
almost any type of product you can think of.
This means millions of tons of raw materials, chemicals, equipment,
machinery etc. Unfortunately, many
chemicals and materials used in industrial processes are pretty dangerous to
either humans, or the environment. We
often produce hazardous waste products that are not easily disposed of. This has been a substantial problem for
manufacturing since the industrial revolution in the US. The general consensus used to be as follows;
if a worker takes a job, they assume and accept all risk associated with that
job. Meaning if you got sick due to
chemical exposure, you accepted that risk and you couldn’t put blame on the
corporation. Of course, this is not the
way we think today. We want to reduce the
contact our workers have with hazardous materials and wastes as much as we
possibly can. But this is often times a
more challenging task than one may think.
Unfortunately, the history of doing this has been a sort of trial and
error process. Not all exposures are as
obvious as you may think. For example
dust in the air is noticeable and can be addressed fairly straightforwardly. But things like radiation are not so easy to
detect, you need special instrumentation and knowledge. This can be seen in the industrial revolution
with the women painting watches with radioactive glow paint and getting
radiation poisoning. In today’s world we
are more careful but just some of the things a worker can encounter include;
strong acids, strong bases, carcinogens, radioactive substances, mutagens,
flammable materials, and more. We as
safety professionals are aware of the risk factors, and signs of exposure to
these substances. Many people think
safety is “common sense” but chemical safety is an example that contradicts
that. Somebody not educated in this type
of work may overlook exposure routes like aerosols etc. They may overlook things like the proper
container to use when working with acidic or basic chemicals. A special container is needed to contain a
strong acid or base in many settings. If
an improper container is used, a leak will result. This leaked chemical can than eat the
containers of other chemicals and cause a potentially very large problem. These chemicals are also dangerous to the
environment as wastes. For example,
landfills are known to seep harmful spent chemicals like motor oil into the
soil and ground water.
For reasons like
that, we see regulations put in place over time to try and avoid these
situations. But chemicals often find
their way into our environment through other routes. An example being just down the drain in our
homes. People don’t tend to think about
that as they pour things down the drain because they assume it will somehow be
taken out. But that isn’t always the
case. Even things like remnants of birth
control can remain in the water even after it is treated and detected in ground
water. We as a society need to be more aware
about what happens to our chemicals once we are done using them.
As the world becomes increasing linked and mobile, so does
the amount of cars on the road. And
naturally, as the amount of people with cars increases, so does the amount of
tires we use. This is especially
prevalent in the United States. In the
United States, 77% of used car tires are illegally dumped, or sent to
landfills. And considering approximately
242 million tires are discarded annually, that is a monumental amount of waste
product.
Although the problem of getting
rid of tires has grown exponentially, it is by no means a new problem. When a car comes to the end of its life, it
is scrapped. A scrap yard will take the
usable parts off the car for resale, and the rest of the metal on the car is
recycled. But what about the tires? Well do to the chemical bonding used to
create tires; we could never do much with them.
They cannot for example be melted down into new tires. Not to mention, tires come in many different
varieties, all having different properties and different chemical
formulas. So what has happened to these
tires historically? Well nothing, but
try and dispose of them in a dumpster and expect to receive a ticket. Try and put them in your trash for the
garbage men to pick up, and expect them to leave them their. It is illegal in many places to simply “throw
away” tires. So what do we do with
them? Well many times you need to take
them to a tire distributer or recycling plant, and maybe even pay them to take
the tires. Tires are then stock piled,
were they sit, collect water, and leach chemicals into the environment. Well now, finally, we have something to do
with them. We can now re-integrate the
rubber into an asphalt mix. The tire is
ground up into little pieces, the metal belts are removed and recycle, and the
rubber is heated up and added to asphalt.
This is a great way to recycle tires, but also really benefits the
asphalt we lay on our roads. This
“rubber infused” material provides a lot of benefits when compared to its
counterpart. Tires grip the road much
better when it has the recycled compound in it, making for better traction. This makes for safer roadways. The compound is also slightly flexible, which
is the main benefit. The United States
has one of the poorest and oldest infrastructures of other prominent
countries. Partly because we simply cannot
repair our roads as fast as they fall apart. The reason asphalt on roads breaks apart is
largely due to the ground moving.
Especially in regions were the ground freezes and thaws. Well this new rubber infused asphalt flexes
to counteract that. This proves for a
much longer pavement life, which translates directly into saving money. So overall, this process gets rid of used
tire hoards, it makes our roads last longer, and it saves money! And those are all largely beneficial to the
country, and the world.
In today’s world, more than
half of all people live in an area that is considered urban. By mid century, this number is expected to
grow to around 70 percent of all people living in an urban environment. But 100 years ago, only 2/10 people lived in
what we would consider a city. As we all
know, humans were once hunters and gatherers.
Often times traveling to follow their food source. A turning point in society was when humans
began to utilize selective breeding in food production. Once we learned how to grow animals and food
in one spot, we were able to establish semi-permanent or permanent
communities. This is where urbanization
really began to start. Irrigation, soil
tilling, and crop rotation also helped increase our food production. Eventually humans got to a point in time where
not everyone had to be producing food.
This led to the development of other trades and eventually,
industry. This caused trade to flourish,
and as trade grew, so did technology.
This is the first time we began to develop what we would call today, a
city. With cities popping up all over
the world, we needed to create an infrastructure system. People began to move to the cities from rural
communities for work to build this infrastructure. In today’s world, urbanization is continuing
to grow, as is our population. People
are moving out of rural communities to work in cities as the United States and
the world moves more towards a service economy.
So how do we accommodate for all these people entering our cities? Also, it is important to consider what impact
on our environment this will have, and what our infrastructure needs will have
to be. And we need to make it as easy as
possible for these people to have a role/job in these communities, to reduce
the probability of creating slums.
Slums
in early larger US cities like the ones in New York created a lot of
problems. Hygiene was extremely poor,
and infectious diseases were the number one cause of death. Dead animals and excrement lined the streets,
safe drinking water was hard to come by, and the amount of people employed
regularly was very low. In fact, we
often think cities are as densely populated now as they have every been, but
that is not the case. Cities used to be
much more densely populated, and it was not out of the ordinary to have a whole
family living in one room. Since than we
have made some significant improvements to extinguishing the side effects of
urbanization, but maybe not as much as you would think. Public housing is the low income housing in
urban areas. It is often ridden with
crime, low sanitation, and lack of infrastructure even today. As a country we are trying to reduce
this. We do this by making housing more
affordable, creating better and more jobs, and getting crime rates down. Of course this is easier said than done, and
will take years to make any significant impact.
But even as we work towards reducing some current problems, the future
ad increased population will surely bring about some new problems.
