One of the tenants of a reasonably modern mechanical engineering curriculum is at least passing coverage of 'product lifecycle', which basically means thinking about disposal/recycling during design. What did the CPG companies think was going to happen when they dumped a billion tiny little pieces of plastic directly down the drain?
Pharmaceuticals are another such issue. Maybe we ought to be designing for inactive metabolites. But getting drugs that work well and are safe enough is a huge challenge already, I admit. Externalities are a bitch.
A friend of mine works in a Pfizer lab and tells me how the technicians are constantly pouring drugs down the normal drains because a lot of rooms don't have the special drains for chemicals.
You'd think it'd be mandatory for every lab to have those special sinks. It may even be, but she tells me everybody is afraid of speaking up about that and various other safety protocols because they don't want it to affect their employment. Even if they did say something, it'll probably get stopped at management and nothing will every come of it.
I was thinking post-consumer. But your comment reminds me of horror stories from India. Regulation there is even less well enforced, based on what I've read.
And she's a biomedical engineer and works with a lot of dangerous viruses both from humans and animals. So it's not just drugs that are getting put into the water sadly.
Bleach is standard for infectious stuff. Some drugs, maybe even most, would be destroyed. But some for sure would not. Maybe chromic acid cleaning solution?
As much debate as I've heard recently over what qualifies a person as an "engineer", one of the key features has always been a very strict adherence to a code of ethics.
I'm starting to wonder if the title is even worth arguing over anymore.
In a highly competitive job market, it's hard to have ethics that result in your unemployment. And any actual "whistleblowing" that costs businesses money can be career-destroying, life-ruining, or (in the case of Snowden) force you to flee the country.
Look at how nobody's broken omerta on what actually happened in VW.
The low-level employees can act ethically and still design unethical solutions:
- development cooks up 20 different solutions, some of them containing plastic microbeads
- plastic microbeads work better than no additive
- plastic microbeads have the same performance as <alternative>
- report concludes: "we clearly should pick <alternative>, due to similar performance and lower pollution"
- management massages report: "we clearly should pick plasic microbeads since it performs equal to <alternative> and is cheaper"
Which code of ethics? You're saying it as if there is and always been an objective code which says what is good and what is bad, and the choice is only to adhere to it or to be evil. I think in fact it's more like there are a tons of claims around, some true, some not, some important, some pretentious bullshit, some outright fraudulent - and one would have to navigate all this mess which also earning a living and maybe also working on stuff that is interesting. If you're unlucky, post-factum it may turn out the stuff you've worked on has horrible consequences - but I wouldn't say it is unethical unless you had full knowledge of what is going to happen. Which most people just don't.
E.g. read about Thomas Midgley, Jr., who worked on both CFCs and TEL. Both proved horrible in the hindsight.
Unfortunately I don't think there are that many cases where engineers even have much independent clout, enough to force the company to "do it right" vs. just make a note of problems. This kind of thing is taught in engineering curricula, but the ability of engineers to stand up to the business and marketing sides of things is pretty limited, outside of regulated industries where there is some specific legal framework requiring the company to do a proper engineering review and follow its recommendations. Then it becomes easier to say that your legal duty requires you to make a particular recommendation, and harder for the company to bypass it (though still not impossible). But if it's legal and just a bad idea? Hard fight to win. It doesn't help that engineers tend to be fairly weakly organized, without a particularly strong professional organization or union or other entity willing to put more muscle into the idea of professional ethics when it comes to actually saying "no" to management.
> What did the CPG companies think was going to happen when they dumped a billion tiny little pieces of plastic directly down the drain?
I'm willing to put part of the blame on the cities for this one. In many cities, wastewater treatment has not been given the necessary investments to properly filter the water before piping it into the lake. Plastic's not the only problem, unfortunately.
No wastewater treatment process is going to filter out microbeads - they're between 0.01mm and 1mm in size. You'd have to change the filters every five minutes.
Properly treated wastewater is just that - treated, to make it safe (i.e. fewer pathogens). It's still not something you'd want to drink out of a tap.
> No wastewater treatment process is going to filter out microbeads - they're between 0.01mm and 1mm in size. You'd have to change the filters every five minutes.
Is that possible? They're much lighter than water and super tiny. Is there even a way to know that you got all of them? You'd almost have to run the affected water through a still.
If they were much lighter than water it wouldn't be as much of a problem for water filtration - they'd float, and settle at the top rapidly. It would remain a large problem as far as untreated discharges though.
Stokes' Law gives settling times (or terminal velocities) for small spherical particles. Terminal velocity is proportional to (difference between particle density & water) * (particle diameter ^2)
A 0.1mm microbead at 0.9 specific gravity will float to the top at 0.54mm/s, or at 1.1 specific gravity will drop to the bottom at the same speed. A 1mm microbead will move 100x as fast. A 0.01mm microbead will move 1% as fast.
I don't see the technical issue with trying to incorporate them into settling plant workflows, only the sociological issue that we routinely underfund municipal works. It's much cheaper to ban the selling of microbeads than to deal with them via settling in a universe where engineers run everything and the environment is sacrosanct, but even so, we don't live in that universe: Raw sewage discharges are common, and such things are not seen as important so long as we're not getting cholera outbreaks. Municipal works don't have the power, political or regulative, to levy new taxes on specific consumer-good industrial practices to pay for any expansion.
Food for thought:
"there are 330,000 plastic beads in a single bottle of Clean & Clear facial scrub"
Most of the problem with untreated sewage in the Great Lakes is burst capacity - when you get a rainstorm, the sewers overflow and dump raw sewage into the lakes.
Having to store an entire storm's worth of water long enough for 10 micrometer beads to filter out simply isn't feasible.
If you build separate sanitary and storm sewers, then you don't have that problem.
About a decade ago, developing a proposal for solving that problem in Kingston, ON was part of my first-year engineering coursework. Obviously, I was not an expert, but after some research, my conclusion was that building storage was the cheapest solution in the short term. Opportunistically separating the sewers made the most sense over the long term.
One of the tenants of a reasonably modern mechanical engineering curriculum is at least passing coverage of 'product lifecycle', which basically means thinking about disposal/recycling during design. What did the CPG companies think was going to happen when they dumped a billion tiny little pieces of plastic directly down the drain?