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Environmental Solutions

Focused on Efficient, Environmentally Sound Solutions

If the human race is to succeed in harmonizing its activities with the planet's ecosystem, large strides must be made towards developing and implementing environmentally sound recycling solutions. To maintain our current prosperity and even our existence on Earth, we must focus on efficient, environmentally sound solutions to our ever-increasing product consumption and resulting wastes. Although there are many means available for the reuse of waste materials, most of those methods consume large quantities of energy in the effort to process the materials into a new, reusable form. Klean Industries' recycling solutions are commercially viable, closed-loop alternatives for recycling. The solutions offered by Klean Industries minimize the external energy needed to process feedstock and are thus an advantageous means of transforming polymer-based waste and other scrap into usable products for recycling.

Growth in industry, agriculture, and transportation since the Industrial Revolution has produced additional quantities of the natural greenhouse gases, plus chlorofluorocarbons and other gases, augmenting the thermal blanket. It is generally accepted that this increase in the quantity of greenhouse gases is trapping more heat and increasing global temperatures, making a process that has been beneficial to life potentially disruptive and harmful. During the past century, the atmospheric temperature has risen 1.1°F (0.6°C), and the average sea level has risen several inches. Some projected, longer-term results of global warming include melting of polar ice, with a resulting dramatic rise in sea levels and coastal flooding, disruption of drinking water supplies dependent on snow melts, profound changes in agriculture due to climate change, extinction of species as ecological niches disappear, more frequent tropical storms, and an increased incidence of tropical diseases.

Among factors that may be contributing to global warming are the burning of coal and petroleum products (sources of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and ozone); deforestation, which increases the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; methane gas released in animal waste; and increased cattle production, which contributes to deforestation and methane production.

In 1994, a UN scientific advisory panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, concluded that reductions beyond those envisioned by the treaty then in effect would be needed to avoid global warming. The following year, the advisory panel forecast a rise in global temperature of from 1.44 to 6.3°F (0.8-3.5°C) by 2100 if no action were taken to cut down on the production of greenhouse gases, and a rise of from 1 to 3.6°F (0.5-2°C) even if action were taken (because of already released gases that will persist in the atmosphere).

A UN Conference on Climate Change, held in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 resulted in an international agreement to combat global warming, which called for reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases by industrialized nations. Not all industrial countries, however, immediately signed or ratified the accord. In 2001 the G. W. Bush administration announced it would abandon the Kyoto Protocol; because the United States produces about one quarter of the world's greenhouse gases, this was regarded as a severe blow to the effort to slow global warming. Despite the American move, most other nations agreed later in the year (in Bonn, Germany, and in Marrakech, Morocco) on the details necessary to convert the agreement into a binding international treaty, which came into force in 2005 after ratification by more than 125 nations.

Cities are growing at an unprecedented rate. Half the Earth's population will soon live in congested, urban regions, mainly in poor, developing countries. If the 20th century was the century of urban sprawl, the 21st century will be the century of the mega city. A mega city is defined as a city with an estimated population of more than 10 million people.

The World's 10 Largest Cities In 1900

Rank	Urban Area	Population
1	London	6.5 million
2	New York	4.2 million
3	Paris	3.3 million
4	Berlin	2.7 million
5	Chicago	1.7 million
6	Vienna	1.7 million
7	Tokyo	1.5 million
8	St. Petersburg	1.4 million
9	Manchester	1.4 million
10	Philadelphia	1.4 million

Currently, there are an estimated 23 mega cities worldwide. By 2015, the number of mega cities is expected to grow to 36. Today, Asia has nine mega cities; Beijing, Mumbai, Calcutta, Jakarta, Osaka, Seoul, Shanghai, Tianjin and Tokyo - and it will soon have four more, including Bangkok, Dhaka, Karachi and Manila. Relative to its level of development, Asia has a greater proportion of its urban population in mega cities than any other region in the world. The world's mega cities take up just two percent of the Earth's land surface, yet they account for roughly 75 percent of industrial wood use, 60 percent of human water use, and nearly 80 percent of all human-produced carbon emissions. These figures suggest that the struggle to achieve an environmentally sustainable economy for the 21st century will be won or lost in the world's urban areas.

The World's 10 Largest Mega Cities As Of 2011

Rank	Urban Area	Population
1	Tokyo	34.8 million
2	Guangzhou	24.9 million
3	Seoul	24.5 million
4	Delhi	23.9 million
5	Mumbai	23.3 million
6	Mexico City	22.8 million
7	New York	22.2 million
8	São Paulo	20.8 million
9	Manila	20.1 million
10	Shanghai	18.8 million

It is projected by international development agencies that by 2025, there will be more than 300 cities with over one million inhabitants. Between 1990 and 2025, the number of people living in urban areas is projected to double to more than 5 billion, and 90 percent of that increase will occur in developing countries. The explosion and growth of mega cities worldwide is unsustainable, unprecedented and ecologically disastrous for human civilization. Sustainable urban development requires realistic limits on any given region's natural carrying capacity, hard-core conservation and recycling of local finite natural resources, the promotion of limitless decentralized alternative energy sources, and a radical shift into environmental, economic and social development alternatives that promote healthy and advanced living arrangements and environments for future urban dwellers worldwide for the 21st century.