Question

You are the industrial ecologist for a manufacturing company whose leading product is cables for personal computers. The principal components of the cable are copper wire, flexible plastic wire coating, and rigid plastic connectors. What by-product or residue streams do you anticipate? About which should you be most concerned?

Answer 1

Cable is the most important product used in any electrical industries, without cable we can not perform any work which needs signal or data transmission. Cable contain different layers of coating which is used to protect copper wire used for data transmission. As mentioned in question, different layers such as copper, flexible plastic, wire coating and plastic connectors, as a ecologist most important concerned is to protect environment from pollution released at the time of manufacturing. Therefore he must differentiate grade of pollution causing material used in cable, and waste management. As we compare all materials used, we can find that plastic coating and plastic connectors both are very highly polluting agents or material, and copper is not a polluting agents but if we don't use pure form of copper then it may leads to wastage of power. As an ecologist he needs to provide best quality of copper by testing and waste management of plastic material used in manufacturing, and finding alternative to plastic which is very harmful for environment.

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