People inherently depend on their environment for air, water, food, and materials for
clothing and shelter. In primitive society, human-made wastes were naturally recycled
for repeated use. When open sewers and dumps were introduced, nature became
unable to reclaim and recycle these wastes within normal time periods, thus interrupting
natural ecological cycles. Traditional economic systems enable products to
be mass-produced and sold at prices that often do not reflect the true cost to society
in terms of resource consumption and ecological damage. Now that society is
becoming more generally aware of this problem, legislative requirements and more
realistic “total” cost provisions are having increasing impact upon engineering
design. Certainly, it is important that the best available engineering input go into
societal decisions involving these matters.