Environmental Impact Statement

Purpose and Need

Contaminants such as plastic waste, light pollution, and electronic waste have a long term risk on ecological and human health. The effect of these contaminants on the environment, marine organisms, and humans is a public concern and calls for the need to develop environmental programs that would salvage the ecosystems and promote human health. The contaminants are permeating our waterways and oceans, filling landfills, and invading wildlife and human bodies. Conserving the natural habitats is crucial to protect their unique biodiversity and sustain environmental products and services human population and for sustainable development in the long term. (Payne, McKeown & Jones, 2019). Therefore, there is an urgent need to design innovative cleanup and disposal strategies that will help address the problem.

The social, cultural, and historical factors has huge consequence of the contaminants to society. Pollution has been a problem since historical periods exposing human populations to diseases and bacteria. The increased development of factories and industries and increased human population since historical periods has resulted in accumulation of plastic waste, light pollution, and electronic waste over time has made the environmental hazardous affecting the ecological and human health (Das et al., 2019). The social and cultural contamination incidents have indirect impact of hazardous waste exposure that may have severe health impacts. There is need for a wide public health response to manage the problem. Living in an environmentally contaminated area causes stress to society.  In addition, the contaminants have an impact to society in that it cases community challenges such as open conflict due to the existing strong differences in opinion regarding the risk of contaminants to health as well as issues of compensation and relocation.

I propose action to be taken to address the issue because OneEarth feels the need to conduct an evaluation on the potential impacts of the project on the cultural, social, biological, and physical environment and identify measures that will compensate, offset, mitigate, reduce, or avoid the potential adverse environmental impacts caused by contaminants. Plastic waste and electronic waste have caused more deaths to marine organisms and humans. Some of the commonly used methods such as unofficial recycling may release chemicals into the environment such as burning of plastics. In addition, concerns have been raised about use and disposal of wastes varied including accumulation of wastes in natural habitats and landfills, which pose physical problems to wildlife such as entanglement and ingestion of plastic. Moreover, leaching of chemicals from waste products such as plastics can transfer the chemicals to humans and wildlife casing severe health problems. The toxic substances can be transferred to the food chain causing severe impact on human health. Therefore, there is urgent need to develop environmental programs that would help monitor production, usage and disposal of waste products such as plastics.

The expectation for developing environmental programs is to design sustainable waste disposal strategies that would help to improve environmental health. Poor disposal of wastes leads to environmental health concerns such as air quality, food safety, diseases control, and healthy environment. The existing strategies of waste management have proven not be satisfactory. Creating a sustainable waste management strategy would help to significantly prevent direct disposal of wastes in our environment. The goal is to achieve a healthy environment and minimizing harmful health effects that result from contaminants. To resolve the waste disposal management problem, the system should be designed to in way that is more environmentally responsible, more responsive, more economical, more efficient, and more equitable. OneEarth will provide project information to assist stakeholders and affected population to have comprehension of the opportunities, impacts, and risks related to waste disposal management. Therefore, information will help to establish effective waste management strategies will contribute towards improving environmental health thereby minimizing harmful effects to human health and ecological environment.

Alternatives

The alternatives that can be used to address the issue and satisfy the need of a healthy environment include: the activity alternatives, which embraces projects, programmes, plans, and policies that would bring positive change in our environment. This alternative requires a change in the nature of the proposed activity (Carvalho, 2021). For instance, rather than disposing in a landfill, the waste can be incinerated. Wastes can be incinerated directly to generate energy. The biogas can be captured and incorporated to generate electricity. Moreover, incineration has been used to alleviate the hazardous wastes such as pesticides, medical wastes, solvents, oils, and hydrocarbons. In addition, rather than using the existing policies that are not satisfactory, we can embrace evidence based policies that would help to monitor the production, usage, and disposal of plastics and other waste products. The reclassification could inspire research into new alternatives that are harmless to human and ecological health, thereby improving waste management and prevent continuous accumulation of plastic wastes in the environment. Applying the 3Rs:  Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle in every stage will help to prevent diversion of wastes to landfills and poor disposal methods to the environment. Therefore, I believe this will be an appropriate category for decision making at this strategic level in EIA.

The location alternatives involves consideration a component of a proposal such as the site of a processing plant. Most of the household, commercial, and industrial wastes are located on surface impoundments or landfills, which in turn contaminate streams, rivers, and groundwater. Burning of wastes pollutes the air and the hazardous gases find their way into the air and the toxic residues remain on leaves. The hazardous wastes products are transferred to animals and humans in different forms, which have harmful health effects (Hobbs et al., 2019). Therefore, this means that locating the processing plant and other industries should be located on geographically separate locations, away from where people reside or water bodies or landfills, will help to prevent the contaminants from affecting the environment and human health. However, this alternative may not be feasible in all areas due to constraints to the location of the activity. For instance, it may not be significant if a potential project under consideration becomes a principal strategic planning initiative such as a municipal plan or Industrial Development zone. Therefore, this means that this alternative may not be feasible in this project.

Process alternatives may be used to mean equipment alternative and technological alternative. The aim of this alternative is to accomplish the same objective of minimizing or preventing electronic waste by using different process or method. For instance, in the case of electronic waste, applying technological alternative would be feasible in addressing the issue. The consumer society produces a lot of electronic wastes and the old technological strategies have provide not to be satisfactory in addressing the issue. The new technological strategies can be implemented as a clean-up strategy to manage the electronic waste disposal. The new technological can be used to increase the rate of recycling as well as the amount of recycled elements. The new technological referred to as “digesters” has proved effective in turning the wastes and biogas into energy that can be used again on site. This technology has proved to be ecofriendly and can be used in recycling different types of wastes including agricultural leftovers, animal waste, and food among others. An alternative technology could be used or an industrial process changed. The project can use this alternative to explore all the possible alternatives to determine one that is best applicable for the environment. The project will be able to select an option that that is least harmful to the environment, at an acceptable cost by the population both in the short term and long term. This alternative will be feasible to the industrial project because it will assist in the identification of the most appropriate alternatives to apply in the proposed project.

Input alternatives are commonly applied in industries that use energy sources or raw materials in their processes. For instance, an industry may use natural gas or high Sulphur as a source of fuel, which have negative impacts on the air quality. For instance, bioplastics can be used an alternative. They are environmentally friendly because they are biodegradable and uses less fossil fuel in its production.  They can be used to replace plastics derived from petroleum products. Substitute resources for fossil fuel can be used in production of bioplastics such as starch, sugar, cellulose, and wood. This has made bioplastic production more environmentally friendly and sustainable as compared to production of conventional plastic. I believe this alternative is innovative because the biodegradability and less toxic nature of the product will help protect the environment from the threat of conventional plastic wastes, make the environment safer and protect the ecological and human health (Payne, McKeown & Jones, 2019). Therefore, this alternative can be integrated into the project proposal and be assess as separate alternatives to help minimize the emissions of hazardous gases into the air.

Design alternatives involves use of different designs to promote sustainable waste management strategies. Appropriate design alternatives to waste management can provide different positive impacts to the environment. The design alternatives can be assimilated into the proposed project to enhance environmental benefits through preventing or reducing significant negative effects to society.

No Action alternative offers a baseline where the impacts of the project alternatives can be compared with the scenario where the project is halted.  It implies a maintenance of the current situation. According to Murari (2019), the no action alternative can have certain importance in the situation where the negative effects of the environment have high significance and can be used if it could be the only realistic alternative to address the problem.  The no action alternative is important in environmental assessment because it offers a platform against which the substantial impacts of other alternatives can be assessed. It is recommended for the EIA to be integrated frequently as part of EIA analysis. In this case it includes maintaining the current waste management strategies, which have proved not satisfactory in reducing or preventing health hazards to the environment. Implementing the no action alternative will hinder the opportunity to develop new and effective waste management strategies that will address the problem of plastic waste, electronic waste and air pollution. In assessing the no action alternative, I believe that forgoing the benefits of the proposed project will have adverse implications on the environment and society at large. Therefore, the no action alternative does not look feasible because there is a need to develop environmental programs that will resolve the long term risks of contaminants on ecological and human health.

Environmental Consequences

The new law regulation under the activity alternative can foster proper waste disposal and apply innovative systems to decrease the potential contamination of ground water from landfill disposal. The historical unregulated and unmitigated dumping practices that lead to harmful ecological and human health effects, can be replaced with modern landfills. The modern landfills are designed to accept wastes based on evidence based policy regulation under the RCRA Subtitle C regulations. These modern landfills comprise of gas collection and removal systems, leachate collection and removal systems, side liner systems, groundwater monitoring systems, and final cover systems. Because of this design, landfills are anaerobically degraded, whereby the biogas is collected, which can be used for electricity generation or heating purposes. Therefore, this has less negative impact on the environment thus very effective in environmental protection and conservation.

Incineration is often used in areas with limited landfill space. It involves use of extremely high temperatures to generate electrical energy. This method has proved to minimize air pollution and disposal of contaminants into the environment. Despite the positive impact incineration has on decreasing waste emissions into the environment, the emissions of ash have proved to be toxic to the environment. This means that the ash causes harmful effects to the environment, thus it is not an effective alternative to apply in the proposed project.

Recycling and reuse alternatives minimizes the need to use natural resources to obtain raw materials. In addition, this alternative is beneficial to the environment because it allows for recovery and utilization of waste materials as an important resource materials. Recycling wastes decreases landfilling or incineration materials which have been recycled, it conserves the natural resources, and minimizes energy consumption and emissions. Therefore, recycling and reuse serves as an appropriate waste management alternative that can be applied to achieve sustainable environment and improve human and ecological health.

Technological alternative such as use of new and advanced technologies in manufacturing or use of products can contribute towards eliminating waste thereby preventing or reducing the presence of contaminants in the environment.  Prevention of waste generation is the major objective of all waste management strategies (Ilankoon et al., 2018). Therefore, technology has demonstrated to be an environmentally conscious strategy that can help protect the environment and minimize harmful health impacts.

Design alternative can be used to improve the environment by modifying elements pf design and processing of products that may generate huge amounts of waste and toxicity. The use of collective strategies of designing and manufacturing services and products can reduce the amount of wastes and toxins generated. The modification may involve using products that are less toxic to reduce the amount of toxic waste and reduce the use of natural resources to protect the ecology.

The human effects on evidence based laws, incineration, recycling, technological alternative, and design alternative action can be positive if the public is educated about these options and the need to use sustainable waste management strategies to conserve the environment. Humans play an important role in the environment and through awareness of the various environmental concepts and environmental friendly products and measures would help to achieve sustainable environmental measures that would create a safe world for everyone to live in.

References

Carvalho, D. M. (2021). Re: Final Programmatic Environmental Impact Report for Connected 2050: Regional Transportation Plan & Sustainable Communities Strategy (State Clearing House Number.

Das, S., Lee, S. H., Kumar, P., Kim, K. H., Lee, S. S., & Bhattacharya, S. S. (2019). Solid waste management: Scope and the challenge of sustainability. Journal of cleaner production, 228, 658-678.

Hobbs, B. F., Rowe, M. D., Pierce, B. L., & Meier, P. M. (2019). Comparisons of Methods for Evaluating Multiattributed Alternatives in Environmental Assessments: Results of the BNL-NRC Siting Methods Project 1. In Improving Impact Assessment (pp. 227-251). Routledge.

Ilankoon, I. M. S. K., Ghorbani, Y., Chong, M. N., Herath, G., Moyo, T., & Petersen, J. (2018). E-waste in the international context–A review of trade flows, regulations, hazards, waste management strategies and technologies for value recovery. Waste Management, 82, 258-275.

Murari, K. (2019). The ‘No-Alternative Scenario’in the Alternative Analysis of NEPA. European Journal of Sustainable Development, 8(3), 11-11.

Payne, J., McKeown, P., & Jones, M. D. (2019). A circular economy approach to plastic waste. Polymer Degradation and Stability, 165, 170-181.