Global Environmental Management – DTU

Week 5 / Module 5: Other Technologies

Groundwater Protection (Philip Binning – Civil Engineer, Dept of Envi Engg, DTU)
- Groundwater important resource
o Bangladesh more than a million groundwater wells
o 75% irrigation from groundwater

-
o Freshwater 2.5%
 30% is groundwater; other glaciers and rivers and lakes
- Global groundwater depletion recorded by NASA
o

 Used gray satellite, can measure earth’s gravitational field.

 More water on surface, greater gravitational field. (This is how it is measured)
 Blue means abundant water/groundwater. Red means depleting reserves.
 India (Red) – depleting by more than 20 mm/year, which is a lot
 Central Valley, California -

o The deeper the groundwater, the more expensive is extraction (since pumped)
o Uses:
 Agriculture
 India 98% used for irrigation
 

o Irrigate Smarter
 Drip Irrigation System – directly to crops, minimize loss

- Water Quality of groundwater

o Issue: Land salinization
  Extracted, crops irrigated with water, seeps to ground (cycle repeats and
concentration of salt increases)

 Agricultural lands are being poisoned due to build-up of salinity

o Issue: Contaminated sites
 i.e. Denmark

 About 30,000 in Denmark, about ½ sqm/km

 Due to:
o Former dry cleaning workshop
o Farmer’s yard where pesticides were used and spilled on ground
 Contaminants leak down into sub-surface into ground. A problem if it will
be used for drinking or for crops.
 Solutions:
 Institute groundwater protection – manage land use in sensitive water
catchment (management strategy)
 Technological solutions – Innovative groundwater remediation strategies
i.e. Enhanced Reductive Dechlorination, Using bugs to degrade
 contaminants

 Engineering tools for assessment

 Life Cycle Analysis – allow calculation of environmental impacts of
technologies
o In DTU, environmental cost was compared in cleaning up
o Graph uses person equivalents measurement
- Management: water footprint and lifecycle analysis
- Technological: drip irrigation, enhanced reductive dichlorination strategy

Soil Management (Stefan Trapp - Ecologist)

- Soil management and Soil degradation
- Origin of Soil
o Denmark 10-15000 years ago covered in ice. Bare rocks and stones and bad weather
was left when ice retreated. Bad weather gave weathering – fine dust
o Algae and Lichens grew on rocks and stones, eventually decayed and gave first organic
matter.
o Roots and litter developed with help from bacteria and mushrooms – first cover of soil
developed. Topsoil formed within 12000 years (10-20 m)
 o

- Value of Soil
o Best soils used for crops
 o Peak land reached in 1990s, since then no new soils

- Threats
o Depletion of Soil
 Depletion of fertility due to overuse
  Depletion of organic matter

o Salinization
  5% being irrigated

wate
r logging, and the salt water or the salty water cannot leach out salts from the
soil and they accumulate. But also if too little water is used, then the plants
take up all water and they can't excrete the salt, and that is, the salt also gets
salty. And salt is very toxic to our cash crops.
 2000 plant species resistant to high salt levels, not cash crops but can be
alternatives in salty soils

o Pollution
 Cities, esp old cities - Heavy metals, arsenic, tar and oil
 Agriculture – Cadmium and Phosphate fertilizer, accumulates into topsoil

o Erosion (compaction, sealing)
 Occurs when soil is bare
 Seen in Mediterranean area
 

- Outlook into the Future

Regional Water Resources Management (Peter Bauer-Gottwein)

-
- So this means that the success story of being able to feed an ever growing world
population is largely due to an increase in irrigated area and increase in irrigation
agriculture. 
- Consequence: If you look here you can see that the global area of natural wetlands has
essentially collapsed, and we are now down to about 15% of the original size of the global
wetlands. 
- So, water crises are very often related to these issues, power, agriculture, and ecosystem
services.
-

- New observation technologies

o By merging observation and models
 o In-situ observation infra is declining for past 20 years, At the same time, new
observational infrastructure has become available based on satellite and airborne
platforms.
Most water balance components can now be monitored remotely: storage change, actual ET, precipitation
(And that includes also components that have been essentially unmeasurable with traditional
technology, such as storage change and regional scales.)

 Satellite radar altimetry is a spaceborne technique that basically

measures the altimetric height of water levels in rivers and lakes.
  These altimeters are mounted on satellites, and if the satellite is on a repeat
orbit, then basically you get time series of river water level at the
intersection points between the ground track of the satellite orbit and the
river. 
 So you basically get time series of river water level and they can
complement existing in-situ discharge records. 
- New missions have changed the orbit and are now on shifting, drifting orbits, like for instance
CryoSat 2, and thereby having higher spatial resolution. And as you can see on this
chart, you can actually track the river water level all along the river course and get
longitudinal water level profiles on big river systems.
- When it comes to predicting ground water, then a subsurface heterogeneity is actually the
key challenge
o i.e. Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.

- Here you see the Yucatán Peninsula from above, just the homogenous land surface, a
bush. However, if you look into the subsurface, then you see these huge long range river, 
- underground river systems which can span over hundreds of kilometers. If trying to predict
ground water flow, contaminate transport, risks to ground water resources and you don't
know about the location and the orientation of those underground river systems. Then you're
really having an almost impossible job.
o Aairborne electromagnetic mapping - efficient in terms of picking up the location
of those underground river systems, and can really make a critical contribution 
- to groundwater resources management on the Yucatan Peninsula.
- Water is always a multi-purpose commodity. It needs to serve many sectors i.e. power,
agriculture 
- It is essential for maintaining national ecosystem services. 
- So when you manage water you're in this multi-objective inter-temporal framework. Need
to balance, and benefits today, versus benefits in the future. 
- Intertemporal issue
o We have worked with hydroeconomic optimization techniques, Stochastics, 
- dynamic optimization techniques, which try to balance all these requirements, all 
- these demands for water in objective Way based on an economic least cost criterion. 
- You quantify costs in the power sector, quantify costs in the agricultural sector.  balance
them, you make the balance future versus present, and you come up with these objective,
rational and quantitative decision rules for water resources management.
- To sum up and conclude a DTU environment, we develop 
- science based decision support tools for regional water resources management.
- When we do that we focus on two key issues. 
o And that is prediction and optimization. 
o The use of new technology satellite and airborne remote sensoring techniques to
increase the reliability and the sharpness of the predictions we deliver to water
managers. 
o And we perform hydroeconomic optimization to obtain rational objective 
o Economics based decision rules for complex water resources management
problems, such as, for instance, the Water-Energy-Food nexus. 

Quiz 5 – Rural Technologies

Week 5: Technologies Assignment

This is what you have to do:

Choose a particular geographical location, e.g. a region, country, city - it could be you own
living area. Choose one environmental technology that is particularly relevant for your
location - or alternatively, one that is currently in use, that you find should be abandoned
there.

1) Explain what it is (or should be) used for and how.

2) Elaborate on why this is particularly good or bad for your chosen area.

3) Mention with a short explanation another location in world where your conclusion would
be opposite, where that technology would either be good or bad, opposite to your first
chosen location.

Solid Waste Management Policy Regime

 Support in the Establishment and Upgrading of Materials Recovery Facilities

 Support in the Closure and Rehabilitation of Dumpsites
 Basura Patrol Program

Waste-to-Energy (WTE)

Waste management has been a persisting problem in the Philippines. The Metro Manila Development
Authority (MMDA) has noted that the country produces an average of 41ktons of garbage daily. In a 2015
report on plastic pollution by Ocean Conservancy and McKinsey Center for Business and
Environment, the Philippines ranked 3rd in being the largest source of plastic leaking into the ocean
and has among the highest trash collection rates in Southeast Asia.
 
Accordingly the government has been seeking alternative solutions to laws and technologies in
place to further tackle the growing problem, such as Waste-to-Energy (WTE). WTE is a technology
that has already been adopted worldwide. It aims to burn Municipal Solid Waste and use the heat
produced to make steam to generate electricity. In 2019, the Department of Energy (DOE) approved
the country’s first WtE facility. The Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) has
also issued guidelines on the establishment and operation of waste-to-energy (WTE) facilities for the
treatment of municipal solid waste (MSW) in the country. With these advancements by the
government, the technology has been attracting the interests of foreign investors to develop more
WTE in the country.
 
I believe that continuous pursuant of this technology would be a step back for the Philippines with
environmental laws in place such as the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of the Philippines and
the Clean Air Act. WTE which includes gasification and pyrolysis still emits toxic pollutants such as
lead, mercury and dioxins, despite WTE companies/advocates claiming it as green technology. It is
also a false claim it as a renewable energy source as it feeds off waste i.e. paper, plastic and glass
generated from natural resources, therefore, depleting them at unsustainable rates. It is also very
expensive which would not be beneficial for the Philippines as a developing country in the long run,
which could otherwise be invested in developing recycling and composting facilities instead,
providing more jobs for the Filipinos than what a WTE facility can offer.
 
As mentioned, many countries have adopted this technology worldwide and the majority of them are
developed countries. Singapore is one of the leading Asian countries utilizing this technology. Aside
from being able to afford the technology, It might have been a viable option for the country as well as
it face limited open space issues for the siting of landfills and high urban populations. 

Similarly, this waste management problem is evident in thePhilippines as it generates more solid waste
along with a growing po-pulation, increasing consumption, and expanding urbanization[10].According to
Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA)[11], thecountry produces an average of 41 ktons of
garbage daily with almost10 ktons/day coming from Metro Manila alone. In 2001, the govern-ment
enacted the RA 9003 or the“Ecological Solid Waste ManagementAct of the Philippines”to encourage the
reduction of waste at source,recovery, recycling and reuse of wastes, and to create mandatory tar-gets
through the local government units[12]. To achieve this goal,every local government units needs to
establish a Material RecoveryFacility (MRF), implement segregation at the source and collect andprocess
all recyclable and biodegradable materials. However, with thevery limited number of MRF equipped with
technologies to reducewastes like recycling and composting, most of the MSW are eitherdisposed in the
dump sites or openly burned which further worsen thequality of heavy polluted air in the cities[13].
Another promising so-lution to address the problem is waste-to-energy (WtE) technologywhich is
becoming interesting to potential investors after the Depart-ment of Energy (DOE) approved the
country’sfirst WtE facility in thecountry. This technology processes MSW to generate energy in the formof
electricity and/or heat, hence, taking a solution addressing both theneed for more sustainable source of
energy and environmental concerns