Environmental Issues Faced by Business and Society

Businesses and the Environment
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The environment of a given entity encompasses every little bit that makes up its surrounding. Businesses, just like people and animals, also have the environments in which they exist. The ecological issues raised by such businesses, always depend on the impact that they have on the environment. In the earlier years, the world’s vastness created the notion or belief that its natural resources were limitless. They could just be used without depletion. However, with increased urbanization and population growth, there is more pressure on these natural resources than ever before. The natural ecosystem that constitutes the environment has become very delicate and unstable. Industrialization has brought with it the growth of businesses. These businesses have various impacts on the environment. In one way or another, business impacts the water, air, soil or the natural vegetation. For as long as they run, businesses will always give out effluents that will affect the environment. Among the environmental issues faced by businesses, are deforestation, land dereliction, ozone layer depletion and the most known of them all; global warming. This paper looks at fracking as one of the issues done by businesses, which affects the environment.
Fracking
This is a new technology in mining deep-lying minerals, which involves drilling through rock strata, in both vertical and horizontal shafts. This method is used to extract mainly the underlying oil and gas. First, vertical shafts are dug through the overlying layers, so as to penetrate to the mineral-bearing layers of rock (Hauter, 2016). The rock layer containing these gas deposits is known as shale. The vertical boring creates the well, which runs all the way to the shale, whose spread is indicative of the minerals’ presence too. Once the vertical drilling reaches this shale, another horizontal drilling process ensues, whose purpose is to ensure the coverage of its entire surface area.
Once the drilling is done, a vent is constructed using a combination of steel and cement, so as to maintain the structure’s stability. The vent is made to create a leeway through which air can circulate, while also acting as a guide along whom the extracted minerals will flow upwards. After the structural setup, a combination of pressurized sand, water and chemicals are pumped in through the vent. The pressure wears down the shale; the water helps in dissolving the gasses, while the sand helps crea...