Role of an Environmental Engineer
Environmental Engineering deals with providing water that is drinkable to people, taking care of waste water, treating it so that when it goes back into an environment, it does no harm to the environment. A wastewater treatment plant, where there is water that is coming from sewage of households and industry treated such that it can be put back into the environment. Waste management is a very important area, as it is obvious that human beings consume a lot of material and also produce a lot of waste. All this waste has to go somewhere, properly treated and hopefully recycled, brought back into the system. We have to analyse what are the waste that are being generated, quantities and types, collect it properly. We are starting to segregate more and more, in most places the waste is segregated at source, and then we can decide what to do with the different types of waste. It has to be transported and as much as possible, we would like to recover whatever we can from waste. Glass, for example, is something that is readily recycled, then you have plastics and many other things and maybe some of the other material which is biomass, which can also be used in some way as fuel or in some other purpose to create energy so that it is just not dumped. So, as much as possible see if we can recycle or reuse some of the material which is coming in waste and only finally, if we cannot do anything with it, see how to dispose and where to dispose. Another aspect of Environmental Engineering is pollution monitoring and mitigation. As urban environment comes up, as cities come up, we pollute air, we pollute water, we pollute groundwater. So, monitoring of this and mitigating, mitigation is very important because just knowing that this is happening is not enough. We have to see how to stop it and how to make sure that the pollution does not keep on increasing. Otherwise our cities are going to get dirtier, the air that we breathe in is going to become more difficult to breathe and our groundwater will become contaminated and it will spread to the environment all around these cities as well.
Environmental Engineering does all this aiming to protect and improve the natural environment, where we all have to cohabit and work and live. It draws upon basic sciences like chemistry, biology, fluid mechanics, because these are sciences that are required for designing, operating the systems that have to be built for providing drinking water and for treating waste, municipal as well as industrial waste. Depending on where the waste comes from, the treatment may be different. We have to see what the contaminants are and how they can be treated or handled before the treated waste is sent back into the environment. This also brings up the very importance of a Civil Engineer knowing chemistry well. Lot of Environmental Engineering processes draw on chemistry and the understanding of chemistry as much as we are concerned. The other aspect is monitoring and modeling of the environment. There are many processes that we have to say how they will evolve over time. So, modeling is very important, we have to understand the phenomena and see how they will affect the world in future? How much will temperature increase? How much will the carbon dioxide in the air increase and if so, how are we going to stop it, how are we going to limit it and how are we going to mitigate. How did these pollutants move? Pollution in a city does not stay just in the air of the city, it can move, it can affect neighborhoods and sometimes we have large movements of contamination. In Europe when there was the Chernobyl accident, the radioactive crowd moved towards large parts of Europe and affected areas that were distant from where the accident occurred. We have to understand how these pollutants will move and where will they reach. The different areas that we have to understand is chemistry, there are reactions and the effects of these reactions have to be understood, biology, because we are dealing with not only human beings but many other living things that are on the earth along with us. Mathematics is needed for the modeling. We need sophisticated models sometimes, which depend on many aspects as there could be in the environment to tell us how the pollutants will change, pollutants will spread and how pollution will increase, and that will lead us to design, for example, design of wastewater treatment plants. For that, we will have to know where it is going to be situated, what waste is coming in, how the population which is producing this waste is going to change with time and therefore see what would be the adequate design for the waste water treatment.
This is a brief explanation on the roles of an Environmental Engineer. Environmental Engineers takes the responsibility of maintaining nature and environment from the activities of human beings and nature.
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