1) The first case study I chose to write about comes from a paper reviewed by Colby College on the topic of air and water pollution in Indonesia. Over the past twenty years, the Indonesian economy has been one of the fastest growing economies throughout all of Asia. Although still considered a developing country, more jobs have become available, income has doubled, and poverty has fallen over the past couple of decades. While this is great for the country to have had huge strides in development, many factories are not up to the environmental code. Attempts have been made as early as the 1980s to improve conditions through the use of agencies like BAPEDAL (established 1989) to lead many of the environmental stability programs combating factory pollution. It wasn’t until 1993 when BEPEDAL’s Program for Pollution Control, Evaluation and Rating, (PROPER) issued a color coded system to evaluate where certain facilities’ pollution levels; black (no effort), red (some effort), blue (satisfying the requirements), green (above the requirements), and gold (exceptionally good) that change started to occur. These ratings were made public and since then pollution levels have declined.

http://personal.colby.edu/personal/t/thtieten/air-ind.html

2) This next case study I am going to discuss comes from United Nations Environment Program being studied in China; specifically about the pollution of the Huangpu River that flows through the heart of Shanghai. Around the 1980s the Haungpu River started having major problems with pollution from industrial zones and domestic sewage. This became a major problem for the 13 million people that the river supplied water for. Eventually the Shanghai Environment
Project Office devised a plan to construct a pipe that ran underneath the river to carry the waste-water to the other side the Pudong Area for pre-treatment with screening. The project costed around $200 million which was mostly supplied for by the World Bank. It was completed in 1993 and has proven to be a success. It recovered the ecological systems of the Huangpu River, improved drinking water quality, and eliminated the unsanitary conditions in the river.

Click to access wpccasestudy2.pdf

3)  I am from Pennsylvania and over the years, fracking has become an increasingly problematic issue. Fracking has been found to contaminate ground water with methane, ethane, and chlorides. These toxic chemicals make it dangerous for anyone living in an area affected by Fracking who own wells. Like the previous two case studies I’ve looked at, this is another issue of environmental pollution. There have been governmental policies put in place in the interest of Fracking but many of the processes of developing these policies come from looking at global development and how these types of issues have been solved throughout the world. I think it’s important to see how the quality of living overall has improved once these regulations and policies have been put in place in order to expedite the process in our own country. We can see how important the environment is and what it means for us to set up a sustainable future by looking at what it has done for other parts of the world.