Difference between revisions of "Team:UMaryland/Practices"

The big idea behind our project is finding a way to mitigate global warming by reducing the emission of a specific greenhouse gas, methane. Because we are interested in implementing our project in landfills and potentially cattle farms as well, we realized that we would have to work closely with the individuals who work in these locations. However, nothing can be achieved if these people share misconceptions about the problems that face our environment, how they are caused, and what can be done to stop them. When interviewing cattle farmers, we found that some of them did not see climate change as a relevant issue, so we decided to put together a brochure that describes the problem of climate change, how methane contributes, and what farmers can do to reduce their methane emissions.

Download the phamphlet in PDF format

Overall, we learned that cattle farmers have diverse points of view and cannot simply be put into one category. For example, through our interviews, we noted that that cattle farmers have differing views on whether climate change exists. Some believe that it is an urgent issue and that the impacts of it have been seen in agriculture, while others believe that temperatures repeat themselves in cycles and there has been no net impact on global weather. It is difficult to convince those who do not believe in global warming the urgency of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, so it is important to raise awareness of extreme climates around the globe and the impact that greenhouse gas emissions have.

Also, we learned that the government places significant regulations on farmers when it comes to their impact on the environment, and farmers may resent these regulations since they believe the regulations harm their farming practices. When farmers were asked what practices harm the environment, the main issues we heard about were chemicals running off into the Chesapeake Bay. Greenhouse gas emissions were often forgotten. We also heard individuals bring up the idea that farmers get bad publicity if they do not respect the environment, so more public pressure on farmers to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions could be very effective. Before our project could be implemented, we would need to raise awareness of climate change as a real problem, educate about the contributions of greenhouse gasses, and work with farmers to figure out a manageable implementation strategy that would not harm their practice.

Our visit to the landfill informed us on the necessity and feasibility of our project design. In regards to necessity, we learned that current methods of removing methane, mainly flaring, are not efficient in generating energy. We learned that flaring requires constant upkeep of the facilities, large infrastructure, and manpower. Our solution aims to integrate landfills into the environment by adopting two metabolic pathways that eliminate methane. We directed our project focus to generating biomass from methane oxidation for subsequent energy generation. In regards to feasibility, we learned that the current piping system of landfills allows room for our project to be implemented. The piping system ensures that our bacteria would live in an environment with concentrated methane, and be able to sequester and oxidize it more efficiently than from the atmosphere.