Going Green

Going Green: Recycling Sustainability at Fort Benning at Georgia

Literature Review

A review of the literature shows that Fort Benning (previously Camp Benning) was named after the General Henry L. Benning. It was founded near Columbus, Georgia, during World War I. By the 1950s it had appeared as the USA's leading training center for infantry. Recycling and Sustainability at Fort Benning sustains the center's 03 main duties: providing a quality community for the Soldiers, families and other people living and working here, force projection, and military training. The center also shelters various important cultural and natural reserves that it protects and manages, vital to congregating the different obligations. Since May 2005, Fort Benning has a committed and strong sustainability plan which started with “Follow Me” (the Fort Benning Sustainability Conference to Sustainability). At the occasion, Soldiers, installation staff and community members studied sustainability theory, generated a dream of a sustainable mechanism and eventually created a 25-year plan for attaining that dream. (Beckerman, 2005)

The word sustainability has become ubiquitous in environmental affairs since the 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) report Our Common Future popularized the concept of sustainable development. While, Recycling is the process of collecting used resources, separating them into types, and using them to manufacture new products. All industrialized countries encourage recycling today, for several reasons. First, landfills—open pits into which garbage is dumped, then covered withdirt—have become expensive to operate. Recycling, by reducing the amount of trash that has to be buried, saves cities money. Second, recycling reduces the extraction and manufacture of fresh resources by mining, drilling, and logging, which reduces harm to the environment. Third, making products from recycled resources uses less energy than making the same products entirely from fresh resources. Since making most types of energy causes greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide to be released to the atmosphere, recycling combats global warming. (Zimring, 2005)

Although recycling of basic metals such as steel and copper has been a profit-making business for over a century, recycling of municipal waste—ordinary garbage—is sometimes criticized by skeptics as inefficient, a useless practice motivated by environmental guilt-feelings rather than economic rationality. Few governments have, however, been persuaded by such arguments, and several scientific studies have shown that most recycling programs do benefit the environment. (Carlson, 2001)

The idea of sustainability, however, has a long history. The term sustainability has a range of definitions running into hundreds, making any preliminary definition necessarily highly abstract, but all cluster around the core idea that some system, process, range of welfare, or set of items can be maintained at a certain rate or level for the long term; the ingredients of this formulation and its applications, however, vary widely, as do their disciplinary roots and practical implications.

Fort Benning's Carbon Footprint

Enviance, Inc. and Fort Benning calculated and pursued the carbon footprint of the installation in 2008, for activities and operations in 2007. Discharges from interior services, various remote activities and military automobiles were gathered using the Internet-based service, Enviance System, ...