Environmental Health and Protection Commons^™

Plastic Recycling Is Inefficient And Expensive, Clark S. Adomaitis

Capstones

Plastics production and incineration contributes more than 850 million metric tons to the emissions that are causing climate change. Emissions are growing at a moment when scientists and world leaders are in agreement that they need to dramatically decrease. Environmentalists say that plastic production makes up 4.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. New plastic plants opening in the U.S. do not line up with emission reduction goals.

At the end of plastics’ lives, a lot of what we’re putting into our recycling bins isn’t getting recycled. In fact, only 18% of trash from New York City homes is actually recycled. …

Leveraging The Popularity Of Virtual Conferencing Due To The Covid-19 Pandemic To Create New Opportunities For Stem Education, Andrew Singh, Nazrul I. Khandaker, Violeta Escandon Correa, Omadevi Singh, Ariel Skobelsky, Farhan Tanvir, Brian Sukhnandan, Matthew Khargie, Elton Selby, Masud Ahmed

Publications and Research

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, virtual learning has become a necessity for K9-16 education. Virtual classwork has been administered through platforms such as Google Classroom, Clever, and iReady. During the summer of 2021, the City University of New York (C.U.N.Y) York College campus hosted its NASA MAA MUREP (Minority University Research and Education Project Aerospace Academy) program virtually using a combination of Zoom, Google Docs, and even Canva, which some students requested as a more intuitive alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint. Students were mentored to use the scientific method to explore their interests in the STEM field, with a geoscience or …

Microbial Diversity In Urban Environments: Concern For Antibiotic Resistance, Ality Aghedo, Mangala Tawde, Nazrul I. Khandaker

Publications and Research

We are almost oblivious to the presence of microorganisms in our daily lives, but they exist and come into contact with us all the time. While some bacteria are harmless, and even beneficial, other bacteria can cause infections. A common treatment to bacterial infections is antibiotics and the success of an antibiotic depends on the resistance of the bacteria to the antibiotic. We conducted experiments to identify the types of bacteria that can be found on surfaces or within soil environments that come into contact with a vast number of people on a daily basis and how this can affect …

Walking As Ontological Shifter: Thoughts In The Key Of Life, Bibi (Silvina) Calderaro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With walking as ontological shifter I pursue an alternative to the dominant modernist episteme that offers either/or onto-epistemologies of opposition and their reifying engagements. I propose this type of walking is an intentional turning towards a set of radical positions that, as integrative aesthetic and therapeutic practice, brings multiplicity and synchronicity to experience and being in an expanded sociality. This practice facilitates the conditions of possibility for recurring points of contact between the interiority perceived as ‘body’ and the exteriority perceived as ‘world.’ While making evident the self’s at once incoherence with it-self, it opens to a space beyond the …

An Update On Groundwater Conditions At The Site Of The York College Cuny Campus In Southeastern Queens County, New York City, Nazrul I. Khandaker, Stanley Schleifer, Zarine Ali, Edward A. Molteni

Publications and Research

The wells operated by the Jamaica Water Supply Company in Queens represent the only large scale utilization of groundwater for public water supply in New York City in recent years. These wells were shut down, for the most part, beginning in 1996. Since that time, water table elevations in the area, which had been drawn down by the withdrawal activity of the Jamaica Water Supply Company, have risen significantly causing some high groundwater problems, including flooding of basements. The New York City Department of Environmental Protection (NYCDEP) has held public hearings on a contemplated resumption of ground water withdrawal in …