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Norton Engineering LLC services

Environmental Impacts

What is meant when we refer to `Environmental Impacts?` Changes in the environment caused by mankind, only by mankind, are known as environmental impacts. While we note that volcanoes and naturally-caused forest fires bring about large changes in the natural environment, these are largely dismissed by definition; they are, after all, `natural.` Floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes cause obvious changes in our environment, but, again, they are natural. Earthquakes?, natural. Only the activities of mankind seem to matter in the popular debate over environmental issues. Environmental impacts are generally those changes in the `natural world` that are caused by mankind in the course of living and working.

Solid Waste Management

Every day in America each person generates about 4.5 pounds of solid waste as a result of living, playing and working. Every year the amount of waste being buried in landfills is increasing despite ever higher claims of recycling and composting. These increasing recycling rate claims are largely the result of changing definitions, not actual reductions in solid waste being landfilled. USEPA documents this increasing amount of landfilling each year, but they don`t broadcast it because too many EPA staff people keep promising that `reduction, reuse, and recycling` will `solve the problem.`

Wastewater Management

Few aspire to become a wastewater treatment engineer, but in the course of my professional life I became one because it is most interesting and has many wonderful challenges to be addressed. For years I have watched the expressions on people`s faces when I was introduced as being in that profession.

Air Pollution

Any change in the natural makeup of our atmosphere is considered `pollution.` Even the addition of oxygen to the atmosphere would be defined as pollution under the strict sense of the definition. The smell of baking bread has recently been attacked because it is an obvious change in the environment.