Undoing the Damage

The developed world is totally dependent on energy to keep us warm or cool, deliver our food, and get us around. It is increasingly clear that we will all pay the price for using fossil fuels to do these things. We need to change the way we get, keep and use energy, on a massive scale. What’s best, and what’s the cost? Wind, solar, biofuels, hydrogen, nuclear? We will discuss what kinds of energy are most renewable, what devices we can use for getting and storing energy, and materials we use in these contraptions.

Mismanaged plastic waste pervades marine, freshwater, and terrestrial environments, and is even present in the atmosphere. Across these systems plastic, in its many guises, is known to exert a variety of pressures on the environment. As awareness of these pressures has grown, efforts have been made to reduce plastic consumption by industry, governments, and the general public. But as our understanding of the complexity of plastic pollution grows, just how much has actually been done, and how far can, or should, we go from here?

Water is our global currency and we're all water consumers, but what happens to the water we use? We all interact with the water cycle and rely on it to provide quality water to meet our needs. Engineering plays a vital role in designing wastewater treatment processes to clean our used water. But what solutions are being engineered to address global challenges that include pharmaceutical drugs, sex hormones, and antimicrobial resistance in our water? And what will future wastewater treatment process look like - where pollutants become products, and Planet Earth’s waste may also be its wealth.