Environmental_Issues

Environmental issues that are interesting and important to me! If everyone could learn to conserve energy and be nice to our environment and use some of our old technology in new way’s, we could maybe delay the depletion of our planet. Start with protecting our dwindling forests, for as long as I can remember, in Sweden when they cut down tree’s they have to replace them with a seedling, so that the forest will grow back. I was born and raised in Sweden, were we are taught to respect and protect our environment. As little children we learned how to survive in the woods with only a pocket knife, fish line, and a rope. The house we lived in during summer and winter holidays was warmed by a wood burning stove in the kitchen, finally in the summer 1971 my grandfather installed cold running water in the kitchen, so that we did not have to carry the water in from the well, or snow to melt in the winter. In the beginning of this year (2010) a Swedish company started to use human body heat to heat an office building in Stockholm. They are using an old technology in a new way, with pipes, water, and pumps they capture the body heat from the daily commuters through the ventilation system, at the Grand Central Station in Stockholm, Sweden. The energy are used to heat water that are pumped through pipes to the office building in order to heat it up. -1- There are a growing need for renewable energy as a replacement for costly and hard to maintain fossil fuels, that causes pollution and aid to the global warming. Seeing that the cost of installing this system to capture body heat and turn it in to energy is fairly low, it is more than likely that it will be coming to this country soon. Combining solar energy, body heat, and geothermal energy will save us a lot of money in the long run and be very beneficial for our environment. -2- Environmental Science I Environmental issues that are interesting and important to me! Lena Alm-Diaz Environmental Science, SC225 Ms. E. McGhee October 27, 2010