Risk Solutions for Carriers
Most garbage is burned in open dumps. The defect of combustion is the accumulation of large amounts of ash, which contains many toxic substances. And gaseous emissions from incineration are dangerous, dioxin is often released. Open burning of plastics is especially dangerous. However, open incineration of household and industrial waste in municipal landfills is on a large scale.
Municipal solid waste should be incinerated in special furnaces.
For Ukraine, France can be an example of an effective solution to the problem of garbage and wastewater management. In almost all cities across the country, there are special incinerators, and garbage is pre-sorted. There are a large number of composting plants that dispose of household waste and produce compost for vineyards and biogas. Reaches this level of struggle for a clean environment of cities and Japan.
An urgent problem of cities around the world is to prevent the generation of large amounts of waste. In the industry for this purpose it is necessary to apply special technologies. In a life in many cases it is enough to change character of packing of the goods to sharply reduce the quantity of household waste.
A number of Western European countries are already refusing to package dairy products in plastic and cardboard bags and prefer containers – glass bottles and jars. With the formation of the European Union, a kind of “packaging war” began between Germany, France and Great Britain, as the destruction of containers and their return to the manufacturer is equally expensive. In the United States, a whole political campaign of “bottle laws” has been launched, ie laws that oblige manufacturers to return from disposable packaging to reusable containers, including bottles.
03.07.2011
The main functional unit of bioecology is the ecosystem. This term was first introduced by the English biologist A. Tensley in 1935.
The system is an orderly interacting and interconnected components that form a single whole.
Ecological system – a complex hierarchical structure of organized matter, in which when combining components into larger functional units, new qualities arise that are absent at the previous level; is the only stable natural complex of living organisms and the natural environment in which they exist; an open thermodynamic system that exists due to the receipt of energy and matter from the environment and has the ability to self-development and self-regulation.
The ecological system has the characteristics of systems:
Emergence – the emergence of new properties that characterize the system, due to the interaction of its individual elements. Qualitatively new, emergent properties of the ecological level cannot be predicted ethan frome summary + based on the properties of the components that make up this level. Indeed, some forest trees, shrubs, grasses, mushrooms, birds, insects, animals have their own qualitative characteristics, but all together they create a new quality – the forest. Aggregate – the sum of the properties of each system, ie the presence of aggregate properties (for example, fertility for the population – the sum of individual fertility of individuals of the species). The heterogeneity of the system (or the principle of diversity) is that the system cannot consist of completely identical elements.
But not every combination of “life – environment” – can be an ecosystem. It can only be an environment where there is stability and a clear functioning of the internal cycle of substances.
During the study of ecosystems are characterized by:
species or population composition and quantitative ratio of species populations; abiotic conditions and resources inherent in this system; the totality of all connections, in the first – food chains, the ratio of organisms with different types of food; the size of primary and secondary products; spatial distribution of individual elements; speed of circulation.
Ecosystems are distinguished by size:
microecosystems (rotten stump, anthill, dead tree trunks); mesoecosystems, or biogeocenoses (forest area, lake, reservoir); macroecosystems (continent, ocean); global ecosystem – covers vast areas or waters defined by their characteristic macroclimates and correspond to entire natural areas (ecosystems of tundra, taiga, steppe, desert, savannah, deciduous and mixed temperate forests, subtropical and tropical forests, marine ecosystems, and our planet) …
According to the degree of transformation of human activities, ecosystems are divided into:
natural – in industrialized countries, ecosystems not captured by human activity are almost gone, except in nature reserves; anthropogenic-natural – forest plantations, meadows, fields, although consisting almost exclusively of natural components, but created and regulated by humans; anthropogenic – dominated by artificially created anthropogenic objects and in addition to humans, there may be only certain species of organisms that have adapted to these specific conditions. Examples are cities, industrial hubs, villages (within construction), ships, and so on.
Biogeocenosis, concept and structure. In 1944, Sukachev introduced the term biogeocenosis.
Biogeocenosis is a set of homogeneous natural phenomena (atmosphere, soil, climatic conditions, flora, fauna) on a certain space of the earth’s surface, combined with metabolism and energy into a single natural complex.
Thus, the biocenosis means a stable system of coexisting biota (autotrophic and heterotrophic organisms). Thus, a biocenosis is a specific set of living organisms in a certain area of land or water. This space with specific habitat conditions is a habitat.
The biogeocenosis includes a biotope and a biocenosis.
Habitat – homogeneous by abiotic factors space of the environment, occupied by the biocenosis (ie the habitat of species, organisms).
A biocenosis is a specific set of living organisms in a certain area of land or water, called a habitat.
The need to introduce the concept of biogeocenosis is due to the fact that the ecological system has no spatial binding (the ecosystem may be a cow with microorganisms that parasitize on her body). Biogeocenosis is always a specific part of the biosphere. From this point of view, the biogeocenosis can be considered as a separate case, or one of the types of ecosystem, which has a clear territorial connection. The term “biocenosis” is conditional because organisms cannot live outside the environment, but it is convenient to use in the process of studying the ecological relationships between organisms.
The ecosystem is often identified with the biogeocenosis. I. Dedyu believes that the categories of ecosystem and biogeocenosis coincide at the level of the plant population and differ fundamentally only above and below this level.
The group and the inanimate environment function together as an ecological system (ecosystem). The term biocenosis corresponds to the group, and the biogeocenosis corresponds to the ecosystem. Thus, not only two terms are superimposed – ecosystem (proposed by A. Tensley) and biogeocenosis (proposed by VM Sukachev), but also two slightly different approaches. The ecosystem, for example, may be, according to a broad interpretation of Western scientists, and the ocean and a drop of water. In the opinion of VM Sukachev, biogeocenosis is an ecosystem within a specific phytocenosis (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1. Scheme of the structure of the biogeocenosis (according to VM Sukachev).
From the ecological point of view, the criteria for the selection of biocenoses and biogeocenoses are the species composition of flora and fauna, the temporal duration of the system and spatial boundaries. A group can be called a biocenosis only when it meets the following criteria (Trojan, 1978):
1. Has a characteristic species composition. There are two characteristic groups of species:
dominant species that create the appearance of the biocenosis (reeds, pine, feather grass, sphagnum, heather), and each of them has its own special, unique appearance; subdominant species, which, although not as distinct as the first group, but their presence reflects habitat conditions. Typical species indicate these specific environmental conditions, although they are often not dominant species. For example, when we mention periwinkle, we see oak, which is dominated by oak.
2. Has the necessary set of species. Biocenosis is a system within which the circulation of matter and energy, which is carried out between the components of the biocenosis and the environment. Therefore, a biocenosis can be called only a system that contains all the elements necessary for the realization of the circulation of matter – especially producers, consumers, reducers. All groups of organisms provide what we call the fullness of the biocenosis. The absence of individual members in a system does not give the right to call it a biocenosis, but only part of the biocenosis, or an incomplete biocenosis.
3. Characterized by a certain duration in time. The biocenosis with its species composition is a stable and durable system, but its inhabitants have different life spans. For example, in microbes it lasts minutes, in small invertebrates – days, in large – years, and forest trees live for hundreds of years. Some biocenoses of tropical forests have a geological history, while in places of fires or eutrophic lakes develop very young biocenoses.
4. Has its own territory and boundaries. The space in which a separate biocenosis operates is characterized by homogeneity and peculiarity of habitat conditions. Small biocenoses can exist on a few square meters (a source with its special fauna and flora), while the groves of the Ukrainian Black Forest, for example, stretch for hundreds of square kilometers from east to west. The main thing in determining the boundaries of the biocenosis is the fullness and realization of the circulation of matter.
It is easy to distinguish the boundaries between two biocenoses if their abiotic and biotic factors are markedly different (lake and meadow, forest and field, swamp and meadow of the annual floodplain). However, even within these biocenoses, if you examine them more closely, you can see smaller full-fledged formations. Most often, the boundaries of the biocenosis are determined taking into account the characteristic life forms (trees, shrubs, forest, meadow or steppe grasses), ie the division of the phytocenosis.
The difficulty in studying biocenoses is that animal organisms can migrate to neighboring phytocenoses and therefore it cannot be argued that a certain plant group necessarily corresponds to a single group of animals.