Chinese boy swimming in trash
“Today everybody is downwind or downstream from somebody else” – William Ruckelshaus
Water pollution can cause serious harm to living organisms or make the water unfit for human uses. Like air pollution, water pollution can be traced to point sources that discharge pollution from a specific location (examples include factory and sewage plant pipes, underground mines, and oil tankers), and nonpoint sources that discharge pollution from broad and diffuse areas (examples include runoff chemicals and sediments from agricultural land, logged forests, urban streets and parking lots, lawns, and golf courses. Pollutions sources that are nonpoint are much more difficult to control for logistical, political, economic, and practical reasons. The top three most villainous human activities that pollute our waterways are agricultural activities, industrial facilities, and mining.
Polluted water has many detrimental effects. Organisms, including humans, are susceptible to chemical and waterborne, infectious diseases, deplete oxygen, cause excessive algae growth, disrupt photosynthesis and food webs, cause cancer, disrupt immune and endocrine systems, and fatally add toxins to aquatic systems. Diseases commonly passed on to humans include typhoid fever, cholera, poliomyelitis, giardiasis, and more.
Diagram of the oxygen sag curve…. point of discharge is the area where pollutants first enter the water
However, water pollution does not affect every type of water system in the same way. Take water pollution in streams and lakes for example. Streams are naturally good at cleansing themselves of pollution by diffusing toxic chemicals downstream. However, this process fails to function when streams have too much pollution and when that pollution is not degradable, oxygen-demanding waste. In the specific case of streams, breaking down stream pollution creases a oxygen sag curve that transforms normal clean water ecosystems into (1) a decomposition zone that can only foster life for a select number of pollution tolerant fishes, (2) a septic zone that can only support fungi, bacteria, and sludge worms, and (3) a recovery zone that resembles a decomposition zone. Luckily, even rivers that have suffered from a great deal of pollution, such as the Cuyahoga River in Ohio or the Thames River in Great Britain, can be significantly helped with a combination civilian pressure and government action. This is good to know because half of the world’s 500 major rivers are heavily polluted. As for lakes, too little mixing and low water flow make lakes and reservoirs vulnerable to water pollution as well. With no flow or mixing, contaminants simply sit in the water and easily start to fester. Another problem for lakes, as seen in the Lake Washington Core Case Study, is eutrophication, or the nutrient enrichment of a lake. Eutrophication is a natural process that is actually good for many lakes, but with an increase of water pollution, eutrophication can quickly overpower a lake and strangle the lake’s ecosystems in algae blooms.
Underneath the surface, groundwater is also affected by contaminants. Over half of Americans get their drinking water from groundwater sources, so any kind of groundwater pollution has the potential to cause serious and widespread health hazards for millions of people. Unlike rivers, groundwater is not very good and cleansing itself. Chemicals that infiltrate groundwater seep into the aquifer’s porous and sponge-like water capture and stay there for a long time. It’s very costly to remove pollution that has infected groundwater sources for this reason. Groundwater also doesn’t have as much oxygen available to help decompose contaminants and moves less than a meter a day (so it takes a long time for contaminants to diffuse. For places like China, where groundwater provides drinking water to over 70 percent of its citizens, groundwater pollution can have terrible affects for human populations. This pollution can come from a variety of sources including agriculture, industry, transportation, and homes. Since it can take thousands of years for groundwater to cleanse itself, the best way of protecting water is preventing pollution from entering groundwater sources. Some preventative solutions to stop groundwater contamination include finding substitutes for toxic chemicals, installing monitoring wells near landfills and underground tanks, requiring leak detectors on underground tanks, banning hazardous waste disposal in landfills and injection well, and storing harmful liquids in aboveground tanks with leak detection and collection systems. Interestingly, several cities (including New York) have started to invest in protecting entire watersheds instead of building water purification plants. This is also a cost-effective strategy because water treatment plants are extremely expensive to build and maintain.
Ocean pollution can hurt native wildlife like this turtle
Oceans are also affected by water pollution. Ocean pollution is perhaps the least understood or talked about form of water pollution because people commonly perceive the ocean as an endless body of water that can serve as humanity’s eternal dumping ground without causing any overwhelming environmental problem. However, this assumption could not be any further from the truth. 80-90 percent of all municipal sewage from most costal areas in less-developed countries are dumped into oceans without treatment. There are a number of preventative solutions to ocean pollution including the reduction of toxic pollutant input, the separation of sewage and storm-water capture lines, the ban of sewage dumping by ships, the regulation of coastal development and oil drilling (especially considering all the damage that companies like Exxon Mobil and British Petroleum have had on the world’s oceans), and the requirement for double hulls on oil tankers. Cleanup solutions for coastal water pollution include the usage of nanoparticles to dissolve the oil or sewage, the requirement of secondary coastal sewage treatment, and the use of wetlands, solar-aquatic, or other methods to treat sewage.
Solid and Hazardous Waste
“Solid wastes are only raw materials we’re too stupid to use” – Arthur C. Clarke
Shredded solid waste
Unlike the natural world, humans have created large amounts of solid and hazardous waste. Waste does not exist in nature; waste is purely nutrients. The natural world operates under a comprehensive recycling system that is emblematic of the third principle of sustainability. Solid waste is any unwanted or discarded material that humans produced that is not a liquid or a gas. There are two types of soil waste including industrial solid waste, or waste produced by mines, farms, and other industries, and municipal solid waste (MSW), or waste that is produced by homes and workplaces. Most industrial nations burn their MSW or bury their MSW in landfills but developing nations usually discard their MSW in open areas for poor people to filter through them and scavenge for things to repurpose and sell. After solid waste, the other major waste form is hazardous waste. According to Miller, hazardous waste or toxic waste threatens human health because it is poisonous, dangerously chemically reactive, corrosive, radioactive, and/or flammable. Examples of these kinds of wastes could be industrial solvents, hospital medical waste, car batteries, household pesticide products, dry cell batteries, and incinerator ash. More developed countries produce 80-90 percent of the world’s hazardous waste and the United States is the highest producer. Also according to Miller, the two greatest reasons to reduce solid and hazardous wastes are that at least three fourths of these mateirals represent an unnecessary consumption of the earth’s resources (in violation of the chemical cycling principle of the three principles of sustainability) and the manufacturing of the products that become waste contribute large amounts of air pollution, greenhouse gases, water pollution, land degradation, and ocean pollution.
So how should we deal with solid waste? Miller says that a sustainable approach is first to reduce it, then to reuse or recycle it, and finally to safely dispose of what is left. In waste reduction, humans produce much less waste and pollution and the wastes we do produce are considered to be potential resources that we can reuse, recycle or compost. In waste management, people attempt to control wastes in ways that reduce their environmental harm without seriously truing to reduce the amount of waste produced. Many specialists advocate for a system that integrates waste management with reduction, or integrated waste management.
Some cities have banned the use of plastic bags in grocery stores
There is a large movement that started a few decades ago to reuse and recycle many of the materials humans discard as waste. The concept is that reusing items decreases the consumption of matter and energy required for the production of new products, thereby reducing pollution and natural capital degradation in one, fell swoop. Recycling items does the same thing to a somewhat lesser extent. One prime example of reusing products is the movement to ban plastic bags at grocery stores and opt for reusable, cloth bags (in my personal life, I simply take my own grocery cart with me to the store, load up my food, and carry home in the cart without a bag of any kind).
There are two types of recycling. Primary (closed loop) recycling melts down materials into products of the same material type and secondary recycling converts waste materials into different products. While some regions operate mixed materials recovery facilities (MRFs), having households sort their own recycling saves more energy, provides more jobs per unit of material, and yields cleaner and usually more valuable recyclables. However, like everything recycling has advantages and disadvantages. Some critics argue that recycling is costly and adds to the taxpayer burden in communities where recycling is funded through taxation. But proponents of recycling say that the net economic, health, and environmental benefits far outstrips the initial costs of recycling.
Some people advocate for burning and burying solid waste. MSW is burned in more than 600 large waste-to-energy incinerators, which use the heat generated to boil water and make steam for heating water or space and producing electricity. While these incinerators do reduce trash volume, produce energy, concentrate hazardous substances into ash for burial, and sell energy to reduce the cost, they also are expensive to build, produce a great amount of hazardous waste, emits some CO2 and other air pollutants, and encourages waste production. As far as burying waste goes, there are two major options. One option is the open dump, which simply deposits solid waste into a sparsely lined hole in the ground and is the system that China uses for 85 percent of its solid waste, and the other option is the sanitary landfill, which spreads out solid wastes in compacted levels interspersed with layers of clay and kept together with strong double liners along the bottoms and sides of the landfills to collect liquids that leach from them. Some of these landfills are also capable of harvesting methane. While Sanitary landfills have low operating cost, can handle large amounts of waste, and filled land can be used for other purposes, they also have a huge release of greenhouse gases, create large amounts of noise, traffic, and dust, can eventually leak, and encourage waste production.
A vegetative buffer between a farm and stream
I think that the best way to deal with water pollution and to reduce solid waste is by taking a multi-pronged, preventative approached. For water pollution that means preventing contaminants from coming into contact with water sources, cutting resource use and waste, reducing poverty, and slowing population growth. Since so much of water pollution comes from agricultural activities, farmers need to reduce their soil erosion by keeping their cropland covered with vegetation and using other soil conservation methods. They also should reduce the amount of fertilizer that runs off into surface waters by using slow release fertilizer and using absolutely no fertilizer of any kind on steeply sloped land. Buffer zones of vegetation between cropland and rivers also would help. There should be governmental incentives for farmers who comply with these techniques and penalties for those farmers who are major polluters. Also, since there are currently no regulations on the disposal of coal ash, measures should be taken to strengthen the Clean Water Act that shift the focus of the law to preventative solutions, regulating the quality of irrigation water, and monitoring current systems for any leaks or problems.
Also, even though I recognize how helpful sewage treatment plants are (and I will continue to condone their creation for the time being), I think the creation of new sewage treatment plants needs to be phased out and replaced with measures to protect their entire watershed with green infrastructure, wetland restoration, and regulations on chemical dumping. Natural processes are a much more natural form of pollution cleanup than treatment plants and create habitats for other organisms and ecosystems to flourish. Also, natural systems of filtering pollution are much more cost effective to build and maintain. And like any solution, people need to be educated about how their lifestyle choices affect their water systems. The need to change the way we deal with water could not be clearer to me than after seeing those pictures from Midway: Message from the Gyre. Seeing the mangled bodies of birds consuming bottle caps and lighters breaks my heart (and is another reason why I need to safely recycling every plastic product I purchase).
Although there are many methods of dealing with solid waste that are much better for the environment than landfills (such as composting and recycling) I think the greatest thing to for governments, businesses, and citizens to emphasizes is cutting down how much we consume. So much of what we buy ends up in a landfill after only a few years and most of what we buy isn’t even necessary to have in the first place. My friend owns over 50 pairs of shoes. Who, who, who in their right mind needs that many pairs of shoes? That’s a sin. And there is no better resource at our disposal than frugality, gratitude for the simply things in life, and consumption reduction. Sometimes I think people purchase so much material things to make up for the sadness and disenchantment they feel with life. I wish people could see how beautiful the surrounding world its.
Watching the sunset is a great alternative to purchasing over 50 pairs of shoes for personal satisfaction
We should swap out our joy for buying new shoes into our joy for watching the sunset, or our joy for playing in the park, or our joy for running with the family dog. Not rejecting green technology (because that will be a necessary part of reversing global warming), but perhaps the best shift our country can make isn’t toward green technologies as much as it is about a healthy spirit that is grateful for the world and things around them and doesn’t want to have an unsustainable amount of material goods at their disposal to make them happy.
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