Glossary of Environmental Science - T

T

  • take-back - a concept commonly associated with product stewardship, placing responsibility on brand-owners, retailers, manufacturers or other supply chain partners to accept products returned by consumers once they have reached the end of their useful life. Products may then be recycled, treated or sent to landfill.
  • technosphere – synthetic and composite components and materials for med by human activity. True technosphere materials, like plastics, are not biodegradable.
  • temperate – with moderate temperatures, weather, or climate; neither hot nor cold; mean annual temperature between 0 – 20 deg C.
  • thermal mass – (architecture) any mass that can absorb and store heat and can therefore be used to buffer temperature change. Concrete, bricks and tiles need a lot of heat energy to change their temperature and therefore have high thermal mass, timber has low thermal mass.
  • third pipe system – a third pipe, in addition to the standard water supply pipe and sewer disposal pipe, which carries recycled water for irrigation purposes.
  • threshold – (ecology) a point that, when crossed, can bring rapid and sometimes unpredictable change in a trend. An example would be the sudden altering of ocean currents due to the melting of ice at the poles.
  • topsoil – mostly fertile surface soil moved or introduced to topdress gardens, roadbanks, lawns etc.
  • total energy use – as applied in this book is the total of combined direct and indirect energy use
  • total fertility rate – the number of children that, on average, a woman would have in her lifetime at present age-specific fertility rates. Calculated as the average number of children born per woman of every given age in a particular year and totalled for all ages.
  • total water use - in water accounting: distributed water use + self-extracted water use + reuse water use cf. water consumption; here used to mean total direct and indirect water use.
  • town water – water supplied by government or private enterprise and known as the mains or reticulated water supply.
  • transfer station – (waste) a facility allowing drop-off and consolidation of garbage and a wide range of recyclable materials. Transfer stations have become an integral part of municipal waste management, playing an important role in materials recovery and improving transportation economics associated with municipal waste disposal.
  • transgenic plant – a plant into which genetic material has been transferred by genetic engineering.
  • Triple Bottom Line – a form of sustainability accounting going beyond the financial ‘bottom line’ to consider the social and environmental as well as economic consequences of an organisation’s activity; generally included with economic accounts. Term coined by John Elkington in 1994
  • tropical – occurring in the tropics (the region on either side of the equator); hot and humid with a mean annual temperature greater than 20oC.
  • turbine - A machine for converting the heat energy in steam or high temperature gas into mechanical energy. In a turbine, a high velocity flow of steam or gas passes through successive rows of radial blades fastened to a central shaft.

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