The course addresses some issues of strategic importance in the field of sustainability, environmental awareness and renewable resources. The course provides a broad background on environmental issues from an ecological perspective, focusing in particular on: impacts of anthropogenic activities (water, air and soil pollution), local and global changes in the natural environment and climate and how these also have an impact on tourism.
Slides of the lectures and scientific articles provided by the teacher.
Learning Objectives
The keywords resources and environment, together with the particular and difficult historical period we are living through, can be considered a good starting point for a high-education action to increase today the knowledge and the environmental awareness of the decision makers, of the technicians and of the citizens of tomorrow.
The conceptual tools the characterize who studies and works in Economy, Social Sciences, Politics and Laws may not include those knowledge contents, related to Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Ecology and Environmental Science and Technology that build up the core of this course and a great and lasting distance, because of communication problems and reciprocal misunderstanding, may arise between the economist, the policy and decision maker, the social and the human scientist and those who study the current environmental issues. The integration between these two worlds of knowledge, between Science and Humanities, is critically low although can be evaluated as instrumental and strategic to face a near future of environmental, demographic, social and economical crisis. For this reason the first aim of this course is to give a contribution to build up a set of operative knowledge and information to increase the evaluation capability of the attenders and their degree of critical reflectiveness and autonomy of judgement, to make more fruitful and bilateral the communication with the specialist, the engineer, the technician, the researcher and the scientist who work in those field that are becoming more and more strategic for the future of the humankind and his only home-planet.
Prerequisites
None
Teaching Methods
Lectures, expert seminars, class discussion on the topics of greatest interest.
Further information
1-2 Experimental lessons at the laboratory of Commodity science (D15 - Social Science Pole).
Seminar with expert of environmental topics.
Type of Assessment
Multiple choice test.
Course program
NATURAL RESOURCES: Renewable and non-renewable natural resources. AIR as resource (liquid air, and production of Nitrogen, Oxygen and Noble Gases). WATER as resource: physical and chemical properties of pure water. Water cycle. Industrial uses of the water. Water and new technologies: desalination technologies (solar distillation, multiflash plant, membrane plants via reverse osmosis, electrodialysis). Drinking water purification technology. Organoleptic, chemical and biological characteristics of drinking water. METALS: physical, chemical and technological characteristics. Iron cycle production process. Copper: metal characteristics and production cycle. Aluminium: metal characteristics and production cycle. Non renewable energy resources (FOSSIL FUELS): coal, oil and natural gas. How does it work a refinery plant.
ENVIRONMENTAL CHEMISTRY: Introduction to the environmental chemistry. AIR pollution (chemical pollutants and particulate matter). Greenhouse gases emissions. Water pollution. Acid rains: causes and effects. Protective role of ozone layer in the stratosphere. Ozone depleting substances (the problem of the ozone hole). Photochemical smog (ozone, nitrogen oxides and other pollutants due to vehicular traffic in the troposphere).
IMPACTS ON CLIMATE: Greenhouse effect, greenhouse gases (GHGs), global warming, climate change. Atmospheric CO2 concentration and temperature: history and trends. Sea water acidification. Glaciers and permafrost melting: recent findings and trends in CH4 atmospheric concentrations.
RENEWABLE ENERGIES: hydropower energy, solar energy (thermal and photovoltaic), wind energy. Biomass and biofuel production. Tourist system based on the relationship between energy production and landscape shaping.
NEW TECHNOLOGIES: Secondary raw materials and innovative raw materials, in the circular economy perspective: the case of a biorefinery.