Experiment 4 Sustainability Analysis
Due to the rapidly growing role of electronics, electronic components, such as diodes, transistors, and integrated circuits are now omnipresent, impacting today’s society. Therefore, it is important to analyze projects and/or experiments related to diodes, transistors, and other components, to determine whether these projects and/or experiments bring us closer to a sustainable society, which is a society that satisfies current needs without compromising posterity’s future needs and fosters consonance between humans and their surroundings[1].
Experiment 4 focused on the different diode circuits and aimed to test EE 346 students’ knowledge of diode operation and improve their ability to measure and…show more content… Although this experiment consumes most of its power from non-carbon emitting energy, a major portion of non-carbon emitting energy consumed is nuclear power. This hinders sustainability because of the risk of a nuclear breakdown, as seen in the past in Three Mile Island, Fukushima, Chernobyl, and more, and the radioactive waste involved in nuclear power, which can negatively affect posterity [6].
Ecology
With climate change and extreme depletion of Earth’s natural resources since the Industrial Revolution, it is important to analyze sustainability in terms of ecology, which means analyzing the environmental impacts of experiment 4.
Experiment 4 required multiple electrical components, diodes, resistors, a capacitor, and more, purchased for the quarter long class and that are most likely disposed at the end of the quarter. Despite their longer life cycles, the diodes used in this lab were only used twice this quarter. According to the Commoner’s law of ecology, “everything must go somewhere,” and these components, at the end of their life cycles or at the end of the quarter, parts of these components will go to the landfill; diodes are often disposed in landfills, but metal parts of resistors are recycled by metal recycling facilities [8]. According to the SLO county independent study, in comparison to recycling, landfilling causes more environmental burdens, such as larger ecological toxicity