CEE 265 Lecture Notes - Shopping Bag, Global Warming Potential, Kilowatt Hour

• School: U of M
• Department: Civil And Environmental Engineering
• Course: CEE 265
• Professor: Phillip Savage

Document Summary

Recycling evaluations: for any recycled fractions you can see the air emissions per functional unit, you can draw conclusions based on the graph, if you recycle the same amounts, the plastic bags are the winner. Was our analysis comprehensive: we didn"t look at water footprint, we didn"t look at material depletion (renewable vs. non, no global warming potential. Plastic bags are not favored worldwide: in some parts of the world there are taxes on plastic bags, some parts of african they actually have a ban. We should think a little more about the economic and social factors: in terms of aesthetics, plastic wastes are harder to look at, paper waste is biodegradable, might sway which type of bag is favored. Life cycle cost: upstream and downstream: visible costs includes costs that the retailer might pass on to the consumer, invisible costs include things like how bags indirectly affect waste disposal costs.