CHAPTER ONE
1.0 THE PROBLEM AND ITS SETTING
1.1 INTRODUCTION
Environmental conservation should be seen as an attempt to tackle virtually all environmental issues towards achieving sustainable development.
Why it is necessary for individual to be environmentally literate is that before 1960, nature was treated as an infinite supply of physical resources to be used for human benefit and exploited as required. Projects were assessed purely in financial terms, without economic valuation of non-cash benefit and without environment consideration.
Population was just increasing and not enough was known about the complex relationship between resources and environment. today increasing human demands are damaging the natural resources base-land, water and air, upon which all the development ultimately depends.`
Industrialized areas contribute to environmental degradation, by their insatiable demands for resources, their production of wastes, and the cumulative effects of their activities affect the environment adversely.
Since individuals are in one way or the other involved in the production system as managers of resources, it is imperative they are made aware of their actions and how best to minimize environment problems that would lead to establishing a sustainable environment and development.
1.1.2 INDUSTRIAL ENERGY AND WASTE
Industry produces environmental problems everywhere, it consumes 37% of the world’s energy and emits 50% of the world’s carbon dioxide, 90% of the world’s sulphur oxide and nearly all the toxic chemicals now threatening ozone layer with depletion. Every year it produces 2100 million tones of solid waste and 338 million tones of hazardous waste. In Nigeria, small-scale unregulated industries often discharge untreated waste, in spite of the efforts of the federal environmental protection agency (FEPA).
There is widespread concern about the disposal of radio active waste from nuclear reactions. At present, there is expected to be a stockpile of one million m3 of high radio active waste. Furthermore, the stock of nuclear power stations is ageing. In 1990, 143 nuclear facilities were in some stage of decomposition.
Industries, however, are realizing that environmental controls bring improvement in efficiency that ought to be implemented if only for fiscal reasons. Industry’s use of water is modest compared to that of agriculture at least partly because industry uses and reuse its own water. In the united States, each cubic metre of water is used nine times by industry before it is allowed to rejoin the weight of its cars and lorries by 25% over the past decade alone, and a 250 kilogramme communication satellite now performs better than a transoceanic cable weighing 150.00 tones (UNEP P.8 1992).
1.1.3 THE ENVIRONMENT PROBLEM
The people of the world have realized that the planet has a limited capacity of absorbing the continuous aggression perpetrated by man on the environment with increasing vigour in the past two hundred years since the first industrial revolution. There was generalized outrage of the pollution of the air in large urban centres, of navigable waterways, of drinking water, and the costal zones. This was the situation on every continent, but it was more noticeable in highly industrialized centres (cellor 1991).
