Environmental Engineering

...and what is that?

As senior year of high school came to a close, everyone was bombarded with the same question over and over again - "What are you doing after high school?". I respond to them with "I am going to school at Wilkes, for environmental engineering". You'd get the typical answers..."Education", "Psychology", "Marketing", and everyone would know that they were. To me they said "Environmental Engineering...sounds complicated...What exactly is that?"

Basically, an environmental engineer comes up with solutions to environmental problems, and works for the betterment of the environment which means better quality of life and sustainable life for both humans and other organisms that occupy this planet.

Why environmental engineering?

I had chosen between two areas of study - computer information systems and environmental engineering. With CIS, there is a good chance that I would be working for a company in an office environment with quite a disconnection from the environment that supports us all.

Computers are powered by electricity, computers become "useless paperweights" very quickly, and computers have to be manufactured and they have to be disposed of. In the CIS industry, I would only add to the problem. In environmental engineering, I would be solving the problem. Computer engineers might work on designing a more efficient chip, but the trend will always be towards greater and greater power consumption (Jevons Paradox); more efficient chips will mean more cheap chips and more power consumption and more electronic waste. It is true that computer technology has done wonders, but we need to be sure that it does not overwhelm us.

Electronic Waste

I realized the impact that our consumerist society has on the world in 2003, when I read an article in the Popular Mechanics magazine about e-waste (electronic waste) and the info-tech graveyards at various locations in rural China, Africa, India, and Pakistan. Electronic waste which was diverted from U.S. landfills by good-hearted citizens was transferred to "middlemen" which transferred the waste to Asian "recyclers" for one-tenth the money than the equivalent American recycler. There were the citizens who were led to believe that their e-waste would be recycled, and the middlemen who didn't care where it went - their job was to make money.

Industrial society created billions of cell phones, game consoles, TV sets, and personal computers. No one thought about how we were going to dispose of these things, which is not only inevitable but regular due to the high rate of obsolesence and inability to economically upgrade or repair these devices.

The villagers in the e-waste recycling area make their living by desoldering, smelting, dissolving, burning, shredding, smashing, and dumping information technology equipment. They do accept the e-waste shipments, but we can be certain that they are either clueless about the hazards of the waste and the crude recovery operations, or they overlook the hazards for the small amount of income that is created from the sale of precious metals, scrap iron, copper, and aluminum. The recycling operations have poisioned the land with heavy metals and dioxins - highly toxic chemicals which break down slowly or not at all. The water is undrinkable, the land looks like a war zone, the life expectancy is shortened. This is the side of the information society that we never hear about in the evening news.

I don't want to be the IT guy who is constantly replacing computers, with the pressure to dispose of the old ones at the lowest dollar amount. I was not keen on going into a field where the theme is often "More is Better" and energy conservation seems to be taken as some kind of joke. "World of Warcraft takes up 16 GB of my hard drive and requires a dual liquid-cooled Intel Core Duo clocked at 3800 MHz with 3 GB of RAM and a GPU guzzling down 300 watts of electricity. My whole computer uses as much power as an electric range, but I don't care!." Sure it is better than the 120,000 watts consumed by the humble ENIAC, but it is that "I Don't CARE!" attitude that is disgusting. You don't have to give up World of Warcraft - but do not EVER take your lifestyle for granted! As a consumerist society, we are borrowing dearly from the Earth at rates far exceeding those of replenishment. The day will come when she will simply be unable to put out the resources needed to support such a society.

About Environmental Engineering

Environmental Engineering is the field of designing systems to protect our environment. A consumerist society such as ours requires control of wastes and effluents to ensure sustainability and health of the biosphere. Our huge demands for energy and other resources places a great burden on the biosphere, and environmental engineering improves the situation either through technology and/or re-working the way we do things.

Environmental engineering applies prinicples of chemical, mechanical, electrical, civil, and biotechnical engineering to develop solutions in areas such as the following:

Recycling and Materials Recovery
Clean Production
Landfill
Waste-to-Energy
Hazardous Waste Treatment
Soil and Water Remediation
Air Pollution Control
Carbon Sequestration
Renewable Energy
Environmental Monitoring
Water Treatment and Delivery
Drainage and Sewerage
Wastewater Treatment

An example

Well, every time you sit down on the commode and do your business that has to go somewhere. In the old days, your #1's and #2's along with everything else that goes down your drains would eventually make it to some body of water...a river, the ocean, a lake. That worked when the population was low and sewage was only #1s and #2s, but now everything imaginable goes down drains and there are so many people. We had to engineer a way to treat our own waste.

Most likely, it goes into a sewer system, designed by what would be called an environmental engineer. It then travels to a treatment plant, designed by an environmental engineer. The waste is cleaned from the water, and in the most modern plants it is digested...producing methane gas which is then burned to generate electricity.

This electricity powers the sewage treatment plant, and any that is left over travels along wires to our homes, schools, and workplaces. After digestion the resulting compost may be spread on crops, which are fed to animals that produce milk and meat that we eat. It works in accordance with nature...everything must be recycled in order to be sustainable.

Hyperion WWTP, Los Angeles Brescia, Italy Waste-to-Energy

On the left: Hollywood, too, has to take a restroom break. The Hyperion Treatment Plant is the last stop for sewage in Los Angeles. The twin chimneys are for the power plant, which burns both the methane gas produced by the sewage and the sewage sludge residue itself.

On the Right: The Waste-to-Energy facility of ASM Brescia in Brescia, Italy produces heat and electricity by incinerating the city's refuse. Incineration is no longer a method of disposal, it is more of a method of power generation, and thanks to environmental engineering, it is cleaner and safer than ever...cleaner than the burning of coal and #6 fuel oil.

Environmental Engineers also design the systems that capture and/or destroy nasty chemicals that come from burning stuff. We burn coal in power plants to make the electricity that heats and lights our homes. We burn garbage in waste-to-energy facilities to recycle its energy content and to prevent it from becoming an environmental and health hazard. We burn the gases emitted by landfills to eliminate odors and reduce their climate-altering effects. The fires burning in cement kilns and blast furnaces around the world manufacture the raw materials from which we constructed our society. All of this burning produces pollutants that must be captured or they pose a risk to the natural world and human civilization alike.

Environmental Engineers develop solutions to water supply and drainage issues, and use nature to our advantage. Green building, recycling centers, waste incineration/thermal treatment, landfill, renewable energy, soil remediation, pollution control, sewerage, water supply...we work with all of that stuff.