Earth Day And Lifecycle Environmental Costs

MountainLogic writes: "With Earth Day April 22 now is a good time to Ask SlashDot reader what are you doing to keep mother earth alive and well. Sure, every cube prisoner has a recycling box under their desk, but the decisions that technical people make can have wide reaching effects on a company and the environment. How often are the environmental effects of a technical decision discussed? How can environmental consequences be brought onto the table? Do formal procedure such as ISO14000 help or are they just full employment acts for consultants? Is there a better way to evaluate the full lifecycle environmental cost of a product? Is it as simple as each of us putting in the extra effort to find greener solutions?"

Comments

Re:Plastic

[ksheff]

Gots to disagree with you on this one. Many landfills do not have adequate seepage protection at the ground level. As a result, many chemicals find their way down to the water table and end up contaminating the local water supply. Largely, this doesn't happen, but when it does the damage is fairly significant

If the plastics were breaking down, that would be true. There is a prof in Arizona that's been doing landfill studies for years. He takes core samples from old landfills to see how the percentage of materials being thrown away changes over the years as well as how the materials behave in the landfill. According to him, paper takes up the most volume (50% or better in some cases) of any single material found in landfills. The percentage of plastic over the years has been decreasing since they have been getting stronger and thinner. What is really interesting is that in a good landfill, there is very little decay. He's pulled out newspapers and hot dogs from the 60s that haven't changed much since they were thrown away. In the cases where water and oxygen were able to get to the materials, it's paper and other organic materials that are decaying and causing inks and other chemicals to move into the water systems, not the plastics.

I'm waiting for the day that materials separation technology becomes good enough that people will want to dig up old landfills to extract the paper and other metals for recycling. Will there be protesters opposing the strip mining of landfills?