What Is Environmental Education?
Today, there is an all important global concern about how to preserve and protect the world’s environment and environmental education is a key component to achieving that preservation. Many governments, businesses and environmental activists spend a lot of time trying to undo damage that has already been done. However, as with many of the world’s difficult problems that require fundamental change, the answer to the environmental quandary likely rests with the children and that is why environmental education in primary and secondary schools is so important.
Environmental education teaches students about the natural environment and about how human beings can enjoy sustainable living and live in a way that respects the ecosystem and does not damage the environment, this is so important for the future. It is not a new concept, although it has certainly changed over the years. Decades ago when environmental conservation was not the important issue that it is today, schools still taught environmental education. In generations past, the goal was to instill an appreciation for and enjoyment of the outdoors and of nature.
Today, environmental education retains enjoyment of nature as a goal for students but it also includes teaching students about the importance of environmental protection including how to live sustainable lives and the political and legal aspects of environmental protection. Often, K-12 environmental education is included in the science curriculum. However, it is becoming more common for high schools to offer environmental science classes as elective courses.
Elementary School Environmental Education
Environmental Education often starts with teaching children what nature is and why it should be respected. This approach is based on the theory that if children have a genuine appreciation and respect for nature that they will naturally want to protect it as they get older.
Many schools choose to incorporate environmental education into the science curriculum by going on field trips to natural history museums, doing activities outside, learning about different plants and animals and participating in community service projects such as park cleaning, recycling projects or planting community gardens.
High School Environmental Education
Environmental education at the high school level can vary widely. Some schools offer highly scientific Earth Science classes where students learn bout the science of the environment and how human actions change it. Other classes may be more political or legal in nature and discuss different environmental laws and United Nations declarations and charters. Finally, some communities have established charter or magnet schools that primarily focus on environmental education.
North American Association for Environmental Education
The North American Association for Environmental Education has established a set of 6 “Guidelines for Excellence” in environmental education. Those guidelines include the principles that:
- Environmental educational materials should be fair and accurate in their description of environmental problems, issues and conditions;
- Environmental education should make students aware of the feelings, values and attitudes that guide opinions on environmental issues;
- Environmental education should build skills such as critical thinking to enable students to handle environmental issues as adults;
- Environmental education should promote civil responsibility and encourage students to make a change;
- Environmental education should be instructionally sound. This means that different learning styles should be accommodated and that there should be goals for and assessment of the students;
- Environmental education materials should be well designed and easy to use.
Why is Environmental Education Important?
On a global level, it is important so that we train the next generation of students to solve what some experts term our environmental crisis. It will raise a generation of students who understand the need to have humans live sustainable lives and who are well equipped to make that happen.
Similarly, environmentalists are likely to be in great demand as the current generation of students graduates and enters the work force. As the United States and many other countries become more concerned with being eco-friendly and with leading “green” lives, environmentalists will be necessary to put programs in place that promote those ideals and to teach others how to do it.
Environmental education is, therefore, important to individual students and to our society as a whole. As our schools prepare students for the world, it is important that they focus on all of the issues that are likely to effect students and the environment is certainly one of those issues.
Migrating Through a Swarm of Battery Recycling Regulations
Everyone uses some sort of battery power. Where in a flashlight or radio or your automobile, there are specific recycling options for both alkaline and rechargeable batteries.
Car batteries are the type of recyclable battery most people are accustomed to. These very often contain a mixture of lead and acid which can be very dangerous if not handled correctly. Most municipalities require any store that sells batteries to take the old batteries back. This allows for a more centralized handling of these batteries which are recycled at over a 90% rate in the mid-’aughts.
Other batteries are more difficult to recycle. Some stores that sell rechargeable and alkaline batteries manage recycling programs. Otherwise, cities and counties may keep informational websites that instruct as to where they can be recycled. In many areas, they are handled as hazardous waste rather than actually being recycled. You may have to collect the batteries yourself and send them into a recycling program yourself in many areas.
How to Design and Install Landfill Caps
This article applies to all typical RCRA Subtitle C Landfill Cap Systems, and is an educational guide only read the USEPA guides before taking any action.
The things that landfill capping can achieve for an old landfill are:
* Diminish exposure on the surface of the waste landfill.
* Prevent vertical infiltration of water into wastes that would produce contaminated leachate.
* Contain waste whilst treatment is being applied.
* Keep in check gas emissions from underlying garbage.
* Produce a terrain surface that can sustain foliage and/or be used for further purposes.
Landfill Capping is the most common manner of remediation as it is in general less high-priced than other technologies and actually manages the human being and ecological risks related with a remediation location.
The design of landfill caps is site specific plus depends on the intentional functions of the scheme. Landfill Caps can range from a one-layer system of vegetated soil to a multifaceted multi-layer method of soils and geosynthetics. In general, less involved systems are essential in waterless climates and more intricate systems are essential in wet climates. The fabric used during the building of landfill caps include low-permeability and high-permeability soils and low-permeability geosynthetic products. The low-permeability materials redirect water and avoid its passageway into the waste. The high permeability materials transmit water away that percolates into the cap. Supplementary materials may perhaps be used to enhance slope steadiness.
The most vital components of a landfill cap are the barrier layer and the drainage layer. Low-permeability soil (clay) and/or geosynthetic clay liners (GCLs) shall comprise the capping layer. A flexible geomembrane liner is positioned over the barrier layer. Geomembranes are as a rule supplied in outsized rolls and are available in quite a lot of thickness (20 to 140 mil), widths (15 to 100 ft), and lengths (180 to 840 ft). The candidate list of polymers normally used is extensive, which includes polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polyethylenes of a range of densities, reinforced chlorosulfonated polyethylene (CSPE-R), polypropylene, ethylene interpolymer alloy (EIA), and various newcomers. Soils used as barrier materials generally are clays that are packed down to a hydraulic conductivity no greater than 1 x 10-6 cm/sec. Compacted soil barriers are commonly installed in 6-inch bare minimum lifts to accomplish a thickness of 2 feet or more. A composite barrier uses both soil and a geomembrane, taking advantage of the properties of each. The geomembrane is in actual fact impermeable, nevertheless, if it develops a leak, the soil component prevents major outflow into the underlying garbage.
For services above putrescible wastes, the gathering and manage of methane and carbon dioxide, powerful greenhouse gases, must be part of facility design and operation.
Concrete Cap/Asphalt
The most successful single-layer caps are composed of concrete or bituminous asphalt. It is used to construct a surface barrier between landfill and the environment. An asphalt concrete cap would reduce leaching through the landfill into an adjoining aquifer.
Subtitle C Capping Layer
The RCRA C multilayered landfill cap is a baseline design that is not compulsory for use in RCRA hazardous waste applications. These caps by and large consist of an upper vegetative (topsoil) layer, a drainage layer, and a low permeability layer which consists of a artificial inside layer in excess of 2 feet of compacted clay. The compacted clay liners are effective if they hold on to a specific dampness content but are susceptible to cracking if the clay substance is dried. Therefore alternative cap designs are typically considered for arid environments.
Subtitle D Cap RCRA
RCRA Subtitle D requirements are for non-hazardous waste landfills. The design of a landfill cover for a RCRA Subtitle D facility is in general a function of the foundation liner arrangement or natural subsoils at hand. The cover must meet the following specifications:
* the material should possess a permeability no greater than 1 x 10-5 cm/s, or equivalent permeability of any floor liner or natural subsoils there, whichever is less.
* The low permeability layer must contain at least 45 cm of sub-soil type material.
* The erosion control layer must be at least 15 cm of earthen material capable of sustaining native plant development.
Different design can be considered, but must be be of equivalent performance as the specifications outlined above. All covers must be there designed to avoid the “bathtub” effect. The bathtub result occurs once a more permeable cover is placed above a less permeable bottom liner or natural subsoil. The landfill subsequently fills up reminiscent of a bath.
Compost Piles Benefit The Environment
One of the most powerful air pollutants is the naturally occurring organic gas, methane. It is a far better greenhouse gas than carbon and is now found in the atmosphere at concentrations of more than 150% over pre-industrial levels.
When people put organic matter in the regular waste stream, such as coffee grounds and sandwich crusts, they are acted upon by decomposing microorganisms, with methane being a common by-product. This is why garbage dumps must be equipped with release valves. Otherwise, they’d literally explode from the pressure.
One way to avoid the bulk and threat of such waste is to keep your own compost pile. Composting food waste is easy to do and extremely beneficial to our environment in so many ways. These are not difficult to keep, even if entire books can be written on the finer points. Nor do they need to smell bad. Many cities are now separately collecting organic wastes as part of municipal compost programs, many of which are then used as fertilizer for city and park lands.
Are We Consuming Toxic PCB From Bad Waste Management?
In just a few years, between their creation in 1930 and when they were banned in the late 1970s, highly toxic PCBs (also known as Polychlorinated biphenyls) were used in countless products and dumped into soil and water all over the world.
In the North America, the Monsanto company (the very same one that brought the world GMO crops) was responsible for most of the PCB production – several million tons of it. While also used as an insulating oil and lubricant, PCBs were also widely used as a pesticide. In one instance, PCB-laden sludge from another company was given to local farmers as a fertilizer in an effort to get rid of it.
Just How Much PCB is in the Food Supply?
Unfortunately, the highly stable and non-reactive characteristics that made PCBs useful to industry also makes them persistent in the environment. They are also “lipophilic” (attracted to fats) and are very likely to bio-accumulate in any organism higher up the food chain, such as meat animals or the people who consume them.
