Close the Loop!

What does it mean to ‘be safe’ in the modern age? We are exposed to hazards that could potentially have detrimental effects on our health far more often than many of us realize or choose to think about (oftentimes even on a daily basis). According to Miller and Spoolman, there are five major categories of hazards that threaten human health: biological ones such as bacteria and viruses, chemical ones from those used in many human-made products and pesticide residue on many of our foods, natural ones such as earthquakes and hurricanes, cultural ones such as various unsafe working conditions, and those caused by lifestyle choices such as having unsafe sex and smoking cigarettes. While “no one can live a risk-free life,” we can still take some personal actions to mitigate the risks we face (e.g. people with access to soap and water can choose to wash their hands regularly to mitigate the risk of bacterial infection) (Miller 443). Not all people face the same amount of daily risk. For example, people who live in a neighborhood right next to a factory that makes products using harmful chemicals (chemicals that are likely left unknown to the surrounding public), face a greater risk from these chemicals than people living in the town 50 miles away. In all likelihood, the town closest to the factory is a lower income neighborhood than the one farther away because the people who live farther away can afford to not take the risk of living so near the factory (i.e. live in a relatively safer area). These people have evaluated this particular risk and decided it was worth it financially to avoid it.
While some can evaluate risks about chemicals in this way in order to protect themselves, there are people whose job it is to evaluate such risks even before the general public gets the chance to assess for themselves. These people for example are the scientists that work on behalf of the organization or company producing the products that are being made with potentially harmful chemicals and/or those that work on behalf of regulating entities such as the government. These are the experts that determine how much of a substance can be used before it is deemed unsafe for human health. Oftentimes they are toxicologists, scientists that specifically are trained in measuring the toxicity of substances. They measure toxicity in many ways such as by testing on animals (which we are now seeing happen less and less frequently as more consumers within the past few years have been demanding ‘cruelty free’ products such as those sold in the cosmetics industry), and by doing human testing as well with people that willingly participate for monetary payment. Also, sometimes they have to test how the chemical will interact with other aspects of the environment as well due to governmental regulations in place that require companies to perform an environmental assessment. Sometimes, with new research and measurement technology being developed, we might find that a chemical we once thought was not harmful actually turns out to be very damaging as it accumulates in nature after using it in manufacturing for many years. This situation can be seen with the widespread use of the chemical DDT during the 1950s in the United States by the budding chemical farming industry. It’s damage was only greatly recognized and protested against in the following decade when influential people such as biologists and conservationist Rachel Carson wrote her now-classic book Silent Spring that exposed the harm of the chemical in wildlife. I believe we must do extensive research on the effects that a product will have on soil, water, and air before we approve it to be sent out into the market (as much testing as we require for when we test it for human health).
Chemical pollution is not the only kind that damages the environment from human manufacturing; there is the great problem of solid waste as well. Think about all of the things we throw out when we use or consume a product. The packaging that we see, the packaging that the shippers see, the scraps of parts of the food we do not eat, the parts of the products that we throw out when they break or when we simply get bored of them, etc. There is no such thing as actually ‘throwing something away’ rather we are just removing it from our immediate dwelling or workspace. Everything on Earth stays on Earth! The waste, if not managed really at all (as is the situation oftentimes in developing nations that have huge cities with either a non-existent sanitation department or one that is not nearly to the scale that it must be in order to handle the volume of trash the city produces), is likely to be seen in the streets, in peoples yards, and in the water ways. This garbage would then likely be washed away with the rain and end up in the ocean eventually. This is why we see huge pockets on the surface of the ocean called ‘great garbage patches’ such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that is bigger than the state of Texas. This is because the currents of the ocean push the waste to certain areas constantly and they end up in a place where two or more currents meet to sort of ‘dump’ the moving trash into an area where they eventually are done being moved by the currents and just float in one general area. Even if waste is managed, this is not an ideal situation either. Instead of floating in the ocean in a big pile, the trash will likely sit on land in a big pile! These are called landfills. They are very harmful because as the trash breaks down, leachates seep in the soil, fumes get exposed into the surrounding air, and the degrading chemicals seep all the way down in the groundwater as well sometimes (which can pollute important drinking water for humans).
I believe that in order to truly solve these problems we need to attack them at the root and not at the end in terms of waste management. We need to stop making products with harmful chemicals! We need to stop making products in which not every aspect of the product or packaging is biodegradable in a relatively short period of time or recyclable in a low-impact and low-energy way! We need to think radically differently about how to manufacture and copy nature to create a closed-loop system. How can society shift to a low-waste economy as soon as possible?
Word count: 1102