Description:

Learning outcomes of the course unit. The aim of the course is to provide students with a holistic overview of the interaction between human activities and the environment. It turns out that evaluating the acceptability of individual products only based on the environmental impacts of one of their stages, e.g. waste disposal or energy consumption, is inadequate and often misleading. In this course the students will be acquainted with the essence of the main environmental categories of impacts: global warming and climate change, loss of stratospheric ozone, the formation of photooxidants, acidification, eutrophication, ecotoxicity and persistent toxicity, depletion of raw materials, reduction of biodiversity. A method of expressing contributions from different human activities to these categories of environmental impacts will be presented and will show how the future environmental impacts of products can be reduced at the design stage.

Abbreviations used:

Semester:

• W ... winter semester (usually October - February)
• S ... spring semester (usually March - June)
• W,S ... both semesters

Mode of completion of the course:

• A ... Assessment (no grade is given to this course but credits are awarded. You will receive only P (Passed) of F (Failed) and number of credits)
• GA ... Graded Assessment (a grade is awarded for this course)
• EX ... Examination (a grade is awarded for this course)
• A, EX ... Examination (the award of Assessment is a precondition for taking the Examination in the given subject, a grade is awarded for this course)

Weekly load (hours per week):

• P ... lecture
• C ... seminar
• L ... laboratory
• R ... proseminar
• S ... seminar