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Jade Johnston
Joined: Apr 5, 2007
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Economic growth + Environmental Sustainability...Its possible!
June 25, 2009 - 07:27 AM
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I spend a lot of time studying environmental problems and discussing these problems with my peers, and one sentiment that I hear quite often is:
"We can't preserve that...it will hurt the economy!" or, "We can't do this differently, it will be more expensive and damage the economy!"
Creativity, inventiveness, ingenuity... These are the characteristics that differ human beings from the rest of the animal kingdom. I think by using these characteristics, and facing our tough dilemmas, we can find solutions to even our most difficult problems.
When reading the required text for an ecology course I am taking, I found a very great example which illustrates this idea. I would like to share it, and I would like to open up a forum for the discussion of other success stories that you have heard of.
Instead of focusing on the impossibility of a situation, lets instead find hope in what we have already achieved, and use that to go on and achieve even greater things.
The example I would like to present deals with air pollution caused by sulfur emitted from coal burning plants.
THE PROBLEM: Sulfur dioxide is a major source of air pollution world wide, and a major contributor to the problem of acid rain.
SOME SOLUTIONS:
1) The technology exists to produce cleaner burning coal, but this process is very expensive.
2) Inorganic sulfur can be removed from coal by washing it, but this will not remove organic sulfur, and the process is also very expensive.
3) Coal gasification converts goal to a gas in order to remove the sulfur. The gas produced from the sulfur can then be used to augment supplies of natural gas. This process is not yet competitive enough.
4) Scrubbing removed the oxides from the gases in the smoke stakes, but is also an expensive producer.
Looking at these solutions, it would be easy to conclude that there is no win win solution when it comes to sulfur emissions from coal. However, in Germany they did find a solution that is win-win.
AN INNOVATIVE SOLUTION:
"A German company in 1980 purchased coal-scrubbing technology and improved on it...rather than disposing of the calcium sulfite rich sludge the company further processes it to produce building materials such as sheet rock or wallboard, which are sold worldwide.
Another innovative approach to removing sulfur has been taken at a large coal burning plant near Mannheim, Germany. The smoke from combustion is cooled, then treated with liquid ammonia..the sulfur-contaminated smoke is cooled in a heat exchange process that allows the chemical reaction between the sulfur rich smoke and ammonia to take place...waste heat from the cooling towers is used to heat nearby buildings, and the plant sells the ammonium sulfate in a solid granular form to farmers to use as fertilizer.
Thus, Germany, in response to tough pollution control regulations, has substantially reduced its sulfur dioxide emissions, and in the process it has boosted its economy."
(Taken from Botkin's book, "Environmental Science: Earth as a Living Planet, Page 512)
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JayJay
Joined: Jun 22, 2009
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Re: Economic growth + Environmental Sustainability...Its possible!
July 1, 2009 - 10:07 PM
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you also have to take in consideration the energy that is required in order to do some of these techniques. Often times it is actually less energy efficient to clean coal, or mine for coal shale, etc.
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