WATER POLLUTION

Water is one of the essential elements we need to live on this planet. Water is a transparent,
tasteless, odorless, and nearly colorless chemical substance that is the main constituent of Earth's
streams, lakes, and oceans, and the fluids of most living organisms. Water covers 71% of the
Earth's surface. Humans have always been wasteful, and that continued to this day. The difference
is that before industrialization the effects weren’t so sever.
Water pollution is a large set of adverse effects upon water bodies such as lakes, rivers,
oceans, and groundwater caused by human activities. They can naturally clean up a certain amount
of pollution by dispersing it harmlessly. Also, water has always been used to carry away unwanted
trash. Since the beginning of civilization people have used our waters to dump their trash in.
Rivers, streams, canals, lakes, and oceans are currently used as receptacles for every imaginable
kind of pollution. Lakes are especially polluted because they cannot cleanse themselves as rapidly
as rivers or oceans.
The substances that cause pollution are called pollutants or contaminants. Contaminants
may include organic and inorganic substances. Also, many causes of pollution including sewage
and fertilizers contain nutrients such as nitrates and phosphates. In excess levels, nutrients over
stimulate the growth of aquatic plants and algae. Pollution is also caused when silt and other
suspended solids, construction and logging sites, urban areas, and eroded riverbanks when it rains.
Organic wastes such as sewage impose high oxygen demands on the receiving water leading to
oxygen depletion with potentially severe impacts on the whole eco-system.
Pollutants in water include a wide spectrum of chemicals, pathogens, and physical
chemistry of sensory changes. Many of the chemical substances are toxic. Pathogens can obviously
produce waterborne diseases in either human or animal hosts. Alteration of water’s physical
chemistry includes acidity, conductivity, temperature and eutrophication. Also, groundwater
pollution is much more difficult to abate than surface pollution because groundwater can move
great distances through unseen aquifers. Non-porous aquifers such as clays partially purify water
of bacteria by simple filtration, dilution, and, in some cases, chemical reactions and biological
activity. When we talk about surface waters, there is for example a spill from an oil tanker that
creates an oil slick that can affect a vast area of the ocean.
Surface waters and groundwater are the two types of water resources that pollution affects.
There are also two different ways in which pollution can occur. If pollution comes from a single
location, such as a discharge pipe attached to a factory, it is known as point-source pollution.
However, when a great deal of water pollution happens not from one single source but from many
different scattered sources, that’s called nonpoint-source pollution.
There are also additional forms of water pollution that exist in the forms of petroleum,
radioactive substances, and heat. Petroleum often pollutes water bodies in the form of oil,
radioactive substances are produced in the form of waste from nuclear power plants, and the last
form – heat is a pollutant because increased temperatures result in the deaths of many aquatic
organisms.
Estimates suggest that early 1.5 billion people lack safe drinking water and that at least 5
million deaths per year can be attributed to waterborne diseases. Beaches around the world are
closed regularly, often because of high amounts of bacteria from sewage disposal, and marine
wildlife is beginning to suffer so we should be worried about the situation at this moment.
Pollution matters because it harms the environment on which people depend. The
environment is not something distant and separate from our lives. It is not a pretty shoreline
hundreds of miles from our homes or a wilderness landscape that we can see only on TV. The
environment is everything that surrounds us, which gives us life and health. Destroying the
environment ultimately reduces the quality of our own lives – and that, most selfishly, is why
pollution should matter to all of us.
There is no easy way to solve water pollution; if there were, it would not be so much of a
problem. Broadly speaking, there are three different things that can help to tackle the problem:
education, laws, and economics and they work together as a team.