Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Navtej Kohli redefining energy conservation!

ARE CURRENT ENERGY CONSERVATION MEASURES SUFFICIENT? Finds out Navtej Kohli.

“Alternative energy”, “recycling”, and “conservation” are terms that have become the buzzwords for the 21st century environmentalists. Although these solutions have long been seen as only hope to save our planet from the perils of global warming or other subsequent disasters, the sad news is – this isn’t really working!!

Reason??
The too much of management involved.

Let’s take recycling as a case in point. Did you ever imagine how many hours does it take to separate plastic, glass, aluminum and cardboard? Countries like Sweden and San Francisco where recycling is mandatory, people are either fined or jailed by the state for improperly sorting their recyclables. But despite of such strict laws in place, these superficial ‘buzzwords’ fails to fix the environment related problems.

Now imagine driving to a stinky receptacle, where people dump week-old pizza box into the cardboard bin or smashed can of beer into the glass container. Nightmarish…isn’t it? However, things would have been not as bad if people were not as careless as they are.

Recycling is not an easy call anymore. Given the large amount of money and government involved with recycling programs, it seems all the more useless to reprocess. And that’s not all! There is an additional set of costs involved in purchasing recycling trucks, hiring drivers for them, their maintenance and other petty expenses. Oh! And did I forget to mention the pollution caused by those ‘additional’ recycling trucks?

Another of those previously significant GREEN terms is Conservation. A word used or rather overused to alarm people that our planet is running out of natural resources. While being miserly with energy resources can be one solution to the problem, yet that’s not all we can do about it.

We have been devising ways to save energy since 1970, turning almost every stone to stay energy-rich. The researches on alternate energy, energy saving equipments proves that. But today, as we step into 21st century, this obsolete approach needs to be reworked upon. Our ever expanding energy needs demands an unconventional approach towards energy conservation. Things are required to be seen in a wider perspective now. The challenge is to discover an alternative that ensures boundless flow of energy without compromising on our standard of living. Nuclear power can be quoted as a perfect example here.