Environmental Laws: Relation With IT

Answer :

Three of the laws set by the 

• Protection Of The Environment Administration Act 1991

There are three main objectives of the Act. Firstly, it constitutes the EPA or the Environment Protection Authority. Then it provides an integrated platform for administering environment protection. Then it allows the EPA to perform tasks that can improve the quality of the environment, and also permits the EPA to perform environmental audit and reporting based on the findings about the state of environment in the state (Buck, 2013). 

The POEA thrives to maintain the balance and sustainability in the environment. It also reduces the risks related to the human health. And it also helps to prevent various damages and degradation of the quality of the environment. POEA works on not only for protecting the environment. Rather, it also focuses on regulating the impacts on human health. It covers environmental components like air, water, noise pollution, waste management, resource reuse, recycling of hazardous materials, radiation, and forestry and so on.

• Ozone Protection Act 1989

The primary objective of the act is to build a system that will help to control the greenhouse emissions and gas to protect the ozone layer. It controls the emission of the substances that are released into the atmosphere or dispersed into the atmosphere. Other atmospheric pollutants also contribute to the depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer. And that let the UV rays enter into the atmosphere, causes greenhouse effect and is harmful for the health of the humans and other animals (Brunton, 2018). 

• Waste Avoidance and Resource Recovery Act 2001 

The act is mainly focused on protecting the environment by ensuring quality waste management process. There are two ways for ensuring that. The first one is to build a sustainable system for waste management and secondly, focusing on the recycling and reusability of various products for reducing the waste. The act encourages effective and efficient use of resources so that the ill effects to the environment can be managed. It focuses on following the ecologically sustainable development principles. Then the act encourages to follow various waste management processes (Gurran, 2011). It suggests, 

• Avoiding unnecessary consumption of resources
• Following recovery of resources through reprocessing, reuse, energy recovery and recycling. 
• Building supporting system to offer continual reduction in the generation of waste. 
• Minimizing the consumption and depletion of natural resources 
• Minimizing the volume of the final waste 
• Building a collaborating platform and involving the communities to reduce waste and following effective waste management processes. 
• Ensuring the adequate funding for resource and waste management through planning, following various programs and offering better service delivery
• Building an integrated source for resource and waste management system for the entire state 
• Assisting to achieve the main objective of PEOA or the Protection of the Environment Operations Act 1997

Relation of the Ozone Protection Act with the IT Profession of Programmer 

The greenhouse gases, mostly carbon di oxide is one of the prominent reasons behind the depletion of Ozone layer. Green computing technologies can be adapted to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases from the computers and from running computer based machineries. Programmers play pivotal role in designing applications and software than runs computers. The computers, mobile devices and computerized large information systems consume very high amount of energy. To reduce that programmers can adapt green coding standards. For example, there is a system caller EnerJ, created by the researchers at the University of Washington (Sampson et al., 2011). The system allows programmers to write optimized code so that the energy consumption is reduced up to 50%. And it will lead to lesser emission of greenhouse gases. Hence, programmer can learn and follow more of such programming framework and standards to promote green computing and to protect the Ozone layer.