Your Questions About Green Living

The Expert answers:

Hi,

From my own knowledge, jobs open for Sustainable Engineering degree are Electrical Engineer, Project Engineer, Project Admin., Project Manager etc.

Some consultancies provide solar installation courses, but I am not sure if it is what you want to do.

And sustainable engineering is a vast concept, you may need to choose your major orientation later, like wind energy, bioenergy, or solar…

The Expert answers:

“How sustainable is the issue of the Mexicans migrating to the USA illegally?”

What is this sentence supposed to mean? It’s gibberish.

The Expert answers:

Live plants, cleaner shrimps, and a substrate that will feed the live plants 😛

this hopefully helped you 🙂

regards.

The Expert answers:

You can do much of the research for details yourself, as i asusme you are doing a theme paper.

First off, in the US, “planning” is not always practiced. Often when it is, politics has great influence over the final product. In most areas where there is some degree of planning, it is only a loosely assembled set of guidelines. There are oftentimes unexpected circumstances which require some variance to those guidelines, often if a hardship is encountered or if the development is truly desired.

Sustainable development is not mandatory. It is usually the initive of the developer.

On a global scale, there are efforts underway to make the building codes that are used in the US and Canada, to blend them with EU standards, to achieve a global standard for buildings, plumbing, electrical and heat. It is not applied globally yet, and not likely to be anything more than some suggestions to countries who have other more pressing concerns.

There are some programs like RoHS which are not mandatory, but are being embraced by many industries. That is just an illustration of one of several third party entities that exist in almost all areas relating to construction and manufacturing that are being adopted voluntarily that influence the final product, be it wire, be it insulation, be it components of the municipal infrastructure.

The short of it is- the ideas of sustainable development are not driving municipal planning directives most of the time- the sustainable development is the voluntary initiative on the part of the developer. This is not to say there is not some influence in the planning process, it just means there is no requirement upon a development to BE sustainable. And there should not be.

There are some issues with cluster housing, that while promote single family homes in a “sustainable” manner, there are some problems with ground water contamination, namely nitrates and other trace pharmaceuticals that will contaminate the water wells in some of those developments in the future due to the surrounding of the well intakes with septic systems. That subsurface flow is not vertical, it follows gravity to some extent, but it also follows and pools bounded by subsurface impervious layers that slope, or they even follow the hydrostatic suction of water wells.

Another problem with sustainable development when taken to an extreme of “smart growth” is it artificially raises the price of property that is available. And often in large urban areas, those areas that are avaiable are far from desirable neighborhoods in many cases. That means higher prices in order to cover costs and expenses.

The Expert answers:

If a city has already been established, constructed, etc, the urban planners would have had to design it to take on a growing population in my opinion. A growing population will need sustainable public transport. If you haven’t allowed for growth, how could you possible allow for any type of reasonable transportation? You have no land to build on what you already have. What if a great idea will improve waste and pollution involved with public transport but requires quite a bit of land? Take Oklahoma City for example, it was poorly designed, i had to live there this past year for undergrad. Just by looking at the layout of Oklahoma’s street’s, (virtually no individual turning lanes so traffic on one street is backed up to the previous intersection just because one car want to make a u-turn), you can tell that OKC did not plan for growth. There is no way OKC could had sustainable transport to its city if the transport required more land, its already a cramped little place. So, in short, i think sustainable transport will come easier to cities that were planned to take on growth from its population.