Jan 11 Dec 23 Oct 14 Oct 08 Dec 24 Sep 08 Jul 09 Oct 05 Sep 22 Alongside air pollution — which is the chief catalyst for global warming and climate change — water pollution has to be counted as the most serious damage being wrought on our planet. As our most precious resource, it is imperative that we take every care in safeguarding the water sources that we have and in avoiding needlessly wasting it.
Water pollution can have disastrous consequences for human life. Plastic items can take hundreds of years to decompose. This trash poses dangers to both humans and animals. Fish become tangled and injured in the debris, and some animals mistake items like plastic bags for food and eat them. Small organisms feed on tiny bits of broken-down plastic, called microplastic, and absorb the chemicals from the plastic into their tissues.
Microplastics are less than five millimeters 0. When small organisms that consume microplastics are eaten by larger animals, the toxic chemicals then become part of their tissues. In this way, the microplastic pollution migrates up the food chain , eventually becoming part of the food that humans eat.
Solutions for marine pollution include prevention and cleanup. Cleanup, in contrast, may be impossible for some items. Many types of debris including some plastics do not float, so they are lost deep in the ocean. The Pacific Garbage Patch is one example of such a collection, with plastics and microplastics floating on and below the surface of swirling ocean currents between California and Hawaii in an area of about 1.
These patches are less like islands of trash and, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says, more like flecks of microplastic pepper swirling around an ocean soup. Even some promising solutions are inadequate for combating marine pollution. Nonetheless, many countries are taking action. According to a report from the United Nations, more than sixty countries have enacted regulations to limit or ban the use of disposable plastic items.
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The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited. Tyson Brown, National Geographic Society. The World Health Organisation WHO says that polluted water is water whose composition has been changed to the extent that it is unusable. In other words, it is toxic water that cannot be drunk or used for essential purposes like agriculture, and which also causes diseases like diarrhoea, cholera, dysentery, typhoid and poliomyelitis that kill more than , people worldwide every year. The main water pollutants include bacteria, viruses, parasites, fertilisers, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, nitrates, phosphates, plastics , faecal waste and even radioactive substances.
These substances do not always change the colour of the water, meaning that they are often invisible pollutants. That's why small amounts of water and aquatic organisms are tested to determine water quality. It is sometimes caused by nature, such as when mercury filters from the Earth's crust, polluting oceans, rivers, lakes, canals and reservoirs. However, the most common cause of poor quality water is human activity and its consequences, which we will now go on to explain:.
Rising global temperatures caused by CO 2 emissions heat the water, reducing its oxygen content. Felling forests can exhaust water resources and generate organic residue which becomes a breeding ground for harmful bacteria. Chemical dumping from these sectors is one of the main causes of eutrophication of water. Much of the plastic pollution in the ocean comes from fishing boats, tankers and cargo shipping.
The transportation and storage of oil and its derivatives is subject to leakage that pollutes our water resources. Deteriorating water quality is damaging the environment, health conditions and the global economy. The president of the World Bank, David Malpass, warns of the economic impact: "Deteriorating water quality is stalling economic growth and exacerbating poverty in many countries". While plants and animals need these nutrients to grow, they have become a major pollutant due to farm waste and fertilizer runoff.
Municipal and industrial waste discharges contribute their fair share of toxins as well. Eighty percent of ocean pollution also called marine pollution originates on land—whether along the coast or far inland. Contaminants such as chemicals, nutrients, and heavy metals are carried from farms, factories, and cities by streams and rivers into our bays and estuaries; from there they travel out to sea.
Meanwhile, marine debris— particularly plastic —is blown in by the wind or washed in via storm drains and sewers. Our seas are also sometimes spoiled by oil spills and leaks— big and small —and are consistently soaking up carbon pollution from the air. The ocean absorbs as much as a quarter of man-made carbon emissions. Examples include wastewater also called effluent discharged legally or illegally by a manufacturer, oil refinery, or wastewater treatment facility, as well as contamination from leaking septic systems, chemical and oil spills, and illegal dumping.
The EPA regulates point source pollution by establishing limits on what can be discharged by a facility directly into a body of water. While point source pollution originates from a specific place, it can affect miles of waterways and ocean. Nonpoint source pollution is contamination derived from diffuse sources.
These may include agricultural or stormwater runoff or debris blown into waterways from land. Nonpoint source pollution is the leading cause of water pollution in U. Transboundary pollution is the result of contaminated water from one country spilling into the waters of another. Contamination can result from a disaster—like an oil spill—or the slow, downriver creep of industrial, agricultural, or municipal discharge.
Around the world, agriculture is the leading cause of water degradation. In the United States, agricultural pollution is the top source of contamination in rivers and streams, the second-biggest source in wetlands, and the third main source in lakes.
Every time it rains, fertilizers, pesticides, and animal waste from farms and livestock operations wash nutrients and pathogens—such bacteria and viruses—into our waterways. Nutrient pollution , caused by excess nitrogen and phosphorus in water or air, is the number-one threat to water quality worldwide and can cause algal blooms , a toxic soup of blue-green algae that can be harmful to people and wildlife. Used water is wastewater. It comes from our sinks, showers, and toilets think sewage and from commercial, industrial, and agricultural activities think metals, solvents, and toxic sludge.
The term also includes stormwater runoff , which occurs when rainfall carries road salts, oil, grease, chemicals, and debris from impermeable surfaces into our waterways. In the United States, wastewater treatment facilities process about 34 billion gallons of wastewater per day.
These facilities reduce the amount of pollutants such as pathogens, phosphorus, and nitrogen in sewage, as well as heavy metals and toxic chemicals in industrial waste, before discharging the treated waters back into waterways. Big spills may dominate headlines, but consumers account for the vast majority of oil pollution in our seas, including oil and gasoline that drips from millions of cars and trucks every day. Moreover, nearly half of the estimated 1 million tons of oil that makes its way into marine environments each year comes not from tanker spills but from land-based sources such as factories, farms, and cities.
At sea, tanker spills account for about 10 percent of the oil in waters around the world, while regular operations of the shipping industry—through both legal and illegal discharges—contribute about one-third. Oil is also naturally released from under the ocean floor through fractures known as seeps.
Radioactive waste is any pollution that emits radiation beyond what is naturally released by the environment.
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