Quote:
Originally Posted by natureguy
2) If these plants are put up in some remote region away from any human residence, then how does one expect to run the plant? People are required to run these factories so they will have to run vehicles that bring their labourers from nearby areas. Now this would add to emissions as well as cost of the end products.
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The other aspect to this issue, is that the more remote areas (with less population) usually have more "pristine" environments, and instead of pollution affecting villagers, the issues raised against the industrial developments are then related to forests, biodiversity and endangered species. It always becomes a trade-off between "not in my backyard" and "not in my nature reserve".
But rather than aiming for piecemeal or over-compartmentalised solutions (as is usually attempted), what is really needed in cases like these is a return to a more genuine implementation of established concepts of "eco-efficiency" (which has lost much credibility via the modern day "greenwashing"); further to this, in the case of properly controlled development of heavy industries, there is need for the more-encompassing frameworks of "Industrial Ecology" and "Symbiotic Industrial Parks" to be re-examined.
Those ideas have been around for some time, in fact there was an earlier thread posted on this forum by Abhishek on that topic: (
Industrial Symbiosis & Industrial Ecology)
There is no reason why these concepts should not be integrated more meaningfully into the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process for industrial development. However these ideas have never been too popular with traditional industrialists (for reasons that are probably beyond the scope of this thread).