HOUSEHOLD HAZARDOUS WASTE DAY.

During this weekend, my family took part in the one-day depot for Household Hazardous Waste. This was as a response to an announcement in the Metro Newspaper.

Hazardous waste is waste that poses substantial or potential threats to public health or to the environment. It has also been defined by U.S. Environmental Lawsa as "Waste that has the potential to pose a substantial (present or potential) hazard to human health or the environment when improperly treated, stored, transported, or disposed of, or otherwise managed". These wastes may be found in different physical states such as gaseous, liquids, or solids. Furthermore, a hazardous waste is a special type of waste because it cannot be disposed of by common means like other by-products of our everyday lives. Depending on the physical state of the waste, treatment and solidification processes might be available. In other cases, however, there is not much that can be done to prevent harm.

We went through the house and collected all the containers that had chemicals which could not be put together with the normal garbage due to their dangerous nature. The chemical we collected included:

• Window cleaners.
• Herbicides.
• Terpentine.
• Aerosol containers.
• Brake fluid.
• Stains for wood.
• Disinfectants.
• Cleaning chemicals.
• WD40 canistas- lubricants-presurised cans.

We took these chemicals to Tunney's Pasture where we found people who took these chemicals from us for proper disposal.

We collected the used paint containers in readiness to returning them to Home Depot.

 

By ensuring that these hazardous wastes are properly deposited, we support and promote a more sustainable society, reduce the amounts of waste generated, and lower the toxicity and persistence of wastes that are generated in our home and eventually, the planet. Just as the journey of a thousand miles starts with one step, the journey to a cleaner, greener planet begins with me.



WEEK 5 - SYSTEMS ARCHETYPES.

DEEP ECONOMY CHAPTER 3.

As the years have passed by, people are taking up more space per person. Individualism has turned into hyper-individualism where by people want to be more and more secluded from their neighbours, friends and even family! In Africa, this has always been viewed as a concept from the "West". Africans have always been very communal people, living together in extended families and always looking out for their neighbours. However, in the latest years, Africans have slowly taken up these Western ways of living and communities are slowly crumpling down into individuals. People want houses further away from each other so they can have "privacy", a word almost foreign to Africa. In the end, it can be deduced that the rate of population growth is not directly proportional to amount of land taken up...we have less people taking up more space..


Many Christians are hypocrites.  They do not know their bible and the preachings have become more about success than love. 
Growth and expansion of Wal-Mart has shattered businesses and led to loss of jobs by communities even though it caters for the needs of the individual / customer. 


The Systems Archetypes in the chapter.
^Geographical Mobility=^Efficiency=^Productivity=physical health=people feeling less bonded to the people among whom they live=crime is more common   / Stability, Broken Marriages; The more individualistic a society is, the higher the chances of divorce.


^Education led to reduced voting despite the fact that education increases civic participation.
Local economies require fewer resources and course less ecological disruption. Eating food grown by your neighbour requires that you ." shed off some amount of your hyper-individualism and replace it with some neighbourliness"

WEEK 2 - SUSTAINABILITY CHAMPIONS

WANGARI MAATHAI.

         Prof.Maathai is an environmentalist who fought her way to a greener Kenya. She fought agains the then Kenyan President and dictator Moi, who wanted to convert Uhuru Park, one of the two only parks in Nairobi into a business centre by contructing a 60-story Kenya Times Media Trust Complex. The plan also included a large statue of the president. She wrote many letters in protest. 

         She introduced her tree-planting concept to ordinary Kenyan citizens in 1976 and went on to develop it into the Green Belt Movement, a broad-based, grassroots organization whose main focus is helping women’s groups plant trees to conserve the environment and improve quality of life. Through the Green Belt Movement, she now has helped women plant more than 30 million trees on their farms, on schools, and on church compounds.

          The Green Belt Movement helps people understand the connection between environmental degradation and a multitude of other issues such as global warming, soil erosion, drought, hunger, poverty. 
 Its projects empower women, providing them with income, raising their status, and advancing their skills as leaders and organizers.

          It has drawn together supporters from across social and economic classes in Kenya and from around the world.

         Maathai has excellent leadership qualities. She was able to pool people from various backgrounds to join her course and make their voices heard. In her activitivism, Maathai was persistent, she didnt give up even when the police arrested her and humiliated her and her supporters in public.  

       "....very important program has been education. Until people understand the linkages between environmental degradation and their own problems, people become trapped, and they feel disempowered, they feel like they can’t do anything, they get overwhelmed by the problems." Maathai.



JAMES LOVELOCK 

        

         James Lovelock invented the electron capture detector, a uniquely sensitive device that could detect tiny amounts of pollution.

         

Gaia Hypothesis:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=VjLC3GjFMv0&feature=relatedd

          His theory that the earth is a living inter-related organism proposses that the earth functions as a single organism that maintains conditions necessary for its survival. Earth's atmosphere is a mixture of unusual and unstable gases, thus life is a present. Earth's gas is not in chemical equilibrium...but is perfect..The whole system of the climate, the rocks, the air the ocean is a self regulated process. Earth will therefore adjust to activities of man. He sees life as a system. Temperature is regulated on earth by clouds. More clouds lead to more sunlight reflected from the sun, and earth cools, less clouds mean more sunlight reaches the earth, erath warms. If we overwhelm Gaia with our population toxins demand on planets, Gaia will act to bring us back into balance with our planet. Gaia proposes an endless future, for life.

        

        

WEEK 4: Leading Change Toward Sustainability, pgs. 7-56.

This book has a lot of insight on helping leaders facilitate transition in their organisations. The idea of a Green Business is often met with lack of support and uncertainty from the employees and management, but with effort and persistence, they begin to understand and appreciate the need for a more sustainable way of carrying out the organisation’s activities.

In the past 200 years, human beings have caused temperatures and sea levels to rise due to global warmin.

Businesses view today’s challenges as opportunities and strive to make industry more sustainable. They are faced with the challenges of how to change and yet still thrive; how to transform their organizations from top to bottom so that their vision of sustainability drives everyday decision-making and defines success. Design can celebrate positive aspirations and create a wholly positive human footprint.

The levers of successful change toward sustainability, (such as altering the thinking, assumptions, beliefs, the way planning and decision making occurs) are complex and require a lot of time and resources to put into place and to accomplish. This means that it has got to start sooner than later to be able to meet the target – decarbonisation. Stakeholders’ expectations in the area of sustainability and AstraZeneca’s desire to manage its reputation were some reasons why the company reduced its emissions drastically. This shows that companies may not necessarily be ‘believers’ in Going Green but they do it to save their face, cut costs, increase profitability and stay in business. The “Take-Make-Waste” production system is one that leads to depletion of our natural resources as opposed to the “Borrow-Use-Return” system which ensures that used energy is returned to nature where it can be re-used for renewed growth. This therefore means that Recycling is one main way of ensuring that our resources last long enough to sustain the future generation.

The story of the Emricks shows the power of initiative and persistence. It doesn’t take too many people to make a difference and bring change to the environment.

DEEP ECONOMY BY BILL McKIBBEN

As I begin to read through the first pages of this book, I am captivated by the narration of the history of energy exploitation. I become aware of the 1712 invention of the first practical steam engine by a British man, Thomas Newcomen, which used steam from burning coal. This must be when the human race began its exploitation of some of the earth's most important resources, page 6: "..Men and women could exploit the earth's storehouse of fossilized energy...coal, oil,...and natural gas...". I agree with the writer's thoughts on how efficiency is the ultimate tool for exploiting the earth's resources in order to advance material wealth and progress. Environment overuse is brought about by our quest for a bigger and better economy,  faster cars, faster and easier ways to cook our foods, easier ways to clean our houses and more.

It is noted that even though productivity was growing faster than it did in the past years, earnings across the globe fell considerably between 2000 and 2004. It is argued that increased minimum wages and corporate taxes stifle the economic growth. However this will only be effective in an environment of zero corruption so that the taxes are used for the purposes intended for them.  I read about two rich individuals that have so much money that they have become spendthrifts buying anything that money can buy, from huge houses to boats and expensive cars. It is so sad that while the rich were investing in these things, one poor Mexican farmer could not sell his produce to some leading global supermarkets like Wal-Mart. Reason being he could not afford greenhouses or the cost of treating his crops with pesticides! This just shows how the environment had been totally ignored while a few rich people just focused on 'efficiency' and making quick money. the inequality is saddening. 

I am fascinated by how far back we have come yet coal, oil and natural gases are still the core of most of our activities.When for example one spends 100 BTU of fossil energy to produce 134BTU of ethanol, this is not an acceptable ratio as it shows that we're spending too much on producing so little. With economic growth, there has been increased stress on the environment and resources. Considering that the world has only been modernized a few hundred years, I fear that earth's natural capital will be depleted in no time unless this growth and the use of these energy sources are regulated. The author here is worried that we are headed for doom as far sustainability is concerned. Considering that the energy we use from coal is only useful for a short while, it is therefore not worth all the carbon dioxide it emits into the atmosphere thus causing global warming. It is hardly possible that earth will be able to sustain our children, our children's children.