waste

Managing Waste Disposal

To optimize the balance between resource use and a healthy society:

Assess the safety of disposing of liquid waste in deep wells. This method of disposal is commonly used to dispose of treated wastewater, chemicals, and oil field brines, but it can potentially induce earthquakes or contaminate groundwater. Geoscience investigations can help make this type of disposal safer.

EARTH: Setting Sail on Unknown Seas - The Past, Present and Future of Species Rafting

On June 5, 2012, a massive dock made landfall on Oregon's Agate Beach, just north of Newport. The dock carried with it a host of castaways, including as many as a hundred species of mollusks, anemones, sponges, oysters, crabs, barnacles, worms, sea stars, mussels and sea urchins. A placard on the side written in Japanese revealed that the dock had been unmoored from the Japanese coastal city of Misawa during the catastrophic tsunami on March 11, 2011, bringing with it an essentially intact subtidal community of Asian species to the Pacific Northwest. Although natural rafts have likely been ferrying organisms around the planet since the very beginning of life of Earth, the geologically recent advent of human settlement, culture and infrastructure is fundamentally changing the rafting game, as EARTH explores in our March issue.

EARTH: Drinking Toilet Water - The Science (and Psychology) of Wastewater Recycling

Would you drink water from a toilet? What if that water, once treated, was cleaner than what comes out of the faucet? Although the imagery isn't appealing, as climate change and population growth strain freshwater resources, such strategies are becoming more common around the world and in the United States.

EARTH: Trash-to-Treasure: Turning Nonrecycled Waste into Low-Carbon Fuel

One man's trash is quickly becoming society's new treasure. In the August issue of EARTH Magazine, we explore how materials that were once considered garbage are now being recognized for their true potential as valuable energy resources capable of solving multiple problems at once. If successful, these waste-to-energy" options could serve as a silver bullet - displacing fossil fuels, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and decreasing the amount of trash that winds up in already teeming landfills. "

EARTH: Managing the Seismic Risk Posed by Wastewater Disposal

The debate over hydraulic fracturing has recently focused on the rise in seismicity throughout the primarily stable interior of the United States. These intraplate regions, though not unfamiliar with earthquakes, have been experiencing an increased amount of seismic activity in the last decade. This unusual increase is likely to be caused in part by wastewater disposal practices related to natural gas production. With such a sensitive issue it is important to keep the facts in perspective.

EARTH: Tracking Plastic in the Oceans

Humans produce over 260 million tons of plastic each year. Almost a third of that plastic goes into disposable, one-time-use items, and only about 1% of it is recycled globally. Where does the rest of the plastic go? How does it interact with our environment? And how will it impact us in the future? In this month's issue of EARTH Magazine, follow the fate of many plastics as they make their way from our homes to our planet's oceans.

EARTH: Trade Imbalance, America Exports Emissions to China

America has made great strides in recent years to reduce carbon emissions by increasing efficiency and turning to other, low or non-carbon energy sources. Meanwhile, carbon emissions in China have grown dramatically during that same time. EARTH looks at this disparity and asks the difficult questions about who is to blame when the coal China is burning is imported from "cleaner" countries and the emissions are produced to manufacture goods exported back to places with lower emissions.
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