Engineering the interface between industry and ecosystems.
9 topics · 11 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Decision-Makers' Guide to Solid Waste Management
United States Environmental Protection Agency · 1989
Frames municipal solid waste management as a hierarchy — reduction, recycling, combustion, landfilling, in that order of preference — and works…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Report on the Investigations into the Purification of the Ohio River Water at Louisville, Kentucky
George W. Fuller · 1898
Establishes from full-scale pilot trials that coagulation followed by slow sand filtration reliably removes the turbidity and bacteria of a muddy…
+5 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Groundwater
R. Allan Freeze & John A. Cherry · 1979
Treats subsurface flow and contaminant transport as one quantitative subject, and is the text that made contaminant hydrogeology a discipline rather…
+1 more at this level
11 works
United States Environmental Protection Agency
Frames municipal solid waste management as a hierarchy — reduction, recycling, combustion, landfilling, in that order of preference — and works through the cost and planning trade-offs a community faces in choosing among them.
link checked 17 Sept 2026William McDonough & Michael Braungart
Argues that merely reducing waste still assumes a linear cradle-to-grave model, and proposes designing products and materials from the outset to circulate endlessly as either biological or technical nutrients rather than becoming waste at all.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Council on Environmental Quality
Explains NEPA's core requirement that federal agencies publicly analyse the environmental effects of a major action before deciding on it, establishing environmental impact assessment as a procedural discipline rather than a substantive constraint on what agencies may do.
link checked 17 Sept 2026George W. Fuller
Establishes from full-scale pilot trials that coagulation followed by slow sand filtration reliably removes the turbidity and bacteria of a muddy river, giving American cities the first evidence-based design basis for municipal water filtration.
Ministry of Health (United Kingdom)
Documents roughly four thousand excess deaths following four days of smog trapped over London by a temperature inversion, and attributes the deaths specifically to sulphur dioxide and particulate smoke from coal fires, driving the case for statutory air pollution control.
United States Environmental Protection Agency
Standardises how emissions from an industrial process are estimated when they cannot be directly measured, becoming the reference figures used in almost every US permitting and regulatory calculation for air pollution since.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States Environmental Protection Agency
Works through the unit processes — coagulation, filtration, disinfection — available for treating a given raw water source, arguing that the right treatment train is decided by raw water quality first and cost second, not the reverse.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States Environmental Protection Agency
Consolidates the design criteria for decentralised wastewater treatment — septic tanks, soil absorption fields, alternative systems — arguing that properly managed onsite systems are a permanent part of water infrastructure rather than a stopgap before sewers arrive.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States Environmental Protection Agency
Lays out the four-phase framework for life cycle assessment — goal and scope, inventory analysis, impact assessment, interpretation — and works through the data and modelling choices that most often change an assessment's conclusion.
link checked 17 Sept 2026R. Allan Freeze & John A. Cherry
Treats subsurface flow and contaminant transport as one quantitative subject, and is the text that made contaminant hydrogeology a discipline rather than a speciality of water supply.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States Environmental Protection Agency
Establishes the four-step process — hazard identification, dose-response assessment, exposure assessment, risk characterisation — used to decide how clean a contaminated site must be before remediation can be considered complete.
link checked 17 Sept 2026