What is water pollution?

Water pollution happens when toxic substances enter water bodies such as lakes,
rivers, oceans and so on, getting dissolved in them, lying suspended in the water or
depositing on the bed. This degrades the quality of water.

Not only does this spell disaster for aquatic ecosystems, the pollutants also seep
through and reach the groundwater, which might end up in our households as
contaminated water we use in our daily activities, including drinking.

Sources and effects of water pollution

Water pollution can be caused in a number of ways, one of the most polluting being
city sewage and industrial waste discharge. Indirect sources of water pollution include
contaminants that enter the water supply from soils or groundwater systems and from
the atmosphere via rain.

Soils and groundwaters contain the residue of human agricultural practices and also
improperly disposed of industrial wastes.

Types of water pollutants

Pollutants can be of varying kinds: organic, inorganic, radioactive and so on. In fact,
the list of possible water contaminants is just too vast to be listed here.

Diseases
The effects of water pollution may appear immediately after exposure and be more
or less violent in the case of drinking water with a high amount of pollutants. On the
other hand, the effects may appear some time after repetitive exposure to water
contaminated with lower amounts of pollutants. The health effects of drinking
contaminated water may range from simple intoxication and stomach aches to
deadly diseases or sudden death.

What Is Water Pollution?

DEFINITION
Water pollution is defined as the presence in groundwater of toxic chemicals and
biological agents that exceed what is naturally found in the water and may pose a
threat to human health and/or the environment. Additionally, water pollution may
consist of chemicals introduced into the water bodies as a result of various human
activities. Any amount of those chemicals pollutes the water, regardless of the harm
they may pose to human health and the environment.

How Does Water Pollution Affect Us?

Water pollution may cause a large variety of diseases and poses a serious problem
for human health. This is mainly because we may get exposed to polluted water in
various ways, including, but not necessarily limited to:

 Drinking polluted water

 Bathing or showering in polluted water
 Swimming in polluted water
 Breathing the vapors of a polluted water while sitting next to a polluted water
source
 Consuming polluted food (meat and/or vegetables) affected by polluted water
 Consuming meat from animals fed with polluted water of food affected by polluted
water (e.g. vegetables irrigated with polluted water or grown in an area with
polluted groundwater)

How do we know when water is polluted?

Some forms of water pollution are very obvious: everyone has

seen TV news footage of oil slicks filmed from helicopters flying
overhead. Water pollution is usually less obvious and much harder to
detect than this. But how can we measure water pollution when we
cannot see it? How do we even know it's there?

There are two main ways of measuring the quality of water. One is to take
samples of the water and measure the concentrations of different
chemicals that it contains. If the chemicals are dangerous or the
concentrations are too great, we can regard the water as polluted.
Measurements like this are known as chemical indicators of water
quality. Another way to measure water quality involves examining the fish,
insects, and other invertebrates that the water will support. If many
different types of creatures can live in a river, the quality is likely to be
very good; if the river supports no fish life at all, the quality is obviously
much poorer. Measurements like this are called biological indicators of
water quality.

What are the causes of water pollution?

Most water pollution doesn't begin in the water itself. Take the oceans:
around 80 percent of ocean pollution enters our seas from the land.
Virtually any human activity can have an effect on the quality of our water
environment. When farmers fertilize the fields, the chemicals they use are
gradually washed by rain into the groundwater or surface waters nearby.
Sometimes the causes of water pollution are quite surprising. Chemicals
released by smokestacks (chimneys) can enter the atmosphere and then
fall back to earth as rain, entering seas, rivers, and lakes and causing
water pollution. That's called atmospheric deposition. Water pollution
has many different causes and this is one of the reasons why it is such a
difficult problem to solve.

Sewage

With billions of people on the planet, disposing of sewage waste is a

major problem. According to 2015 and 2016 figures from the World
Health Organization, some 663 million people (9 percent of the world's
population) don't have access to safe drinking water, while 2.4 billion (40
percent of the world's population) don't have proper sanitation (hygienic
toilet facilities); although there have been great improvements in securing
access to clean water, relatively little progress has been made on
improving global sanitation in the last decade. Sewage disposal affects
people's immediate environments and leads to water-related illnesses
such as diarrhea that kills 525,000 children under five each
year. [3] (Back in 2002, the World Health Organization estimated that
water-related diseases could kill as many as 135 million people by 2020.)
In developed countries, most people have flush toilets that take sewage
waste quickly and hygienically away from their homes.

Yet the problem of sewage disposal does not end there. When you flush
the toilet, the waste has to go somewhere and, even after it leaves the
sewage treatment works, there is still waste to dispose of. Sometimes
sewage waste is pumped untreated into the sea. Until the early 1990s,
around 5 million tons of sewage was dumped by barge from New York
City each year. [4] According to 2002 figures from the UK government's
Department for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), the
sewers of Britain collect around 11 billion liters of waste water every day,
some of it still pumped untreated into the sea through long pipes. [5] The
New River that crosses the border from Mexico into California once
carried with it 20–25 million gallons (76–95 million liters) of raw sewage
each day; a new waste water plant on the US-Mexico border, completed
in 2007, substantially solved that problem. [6] Unfortunately, even in
some of the richest nations, the practice of dumping sewage into the sea
continues. In early 2012, it was reported that the tiny island of Guernsey
(between Britain and France) has decided to continue dumping 16,000
tons of raw sewage into the sea each day.

In theory, sewage is a completely natural substance that should be

broken down harmlessly in the environment: 90 percent of sewage is
water. [7] In practice, sewage contains all kinds of other chemicals, from
the pharmaceutical drugs people take to the paper, plastic, and other
wastes they flush down their toilets. When people are sick with viruses,
the sewage they produce carries those viruses into the environment. It is
possible to catch illnesses such as hepatitis, typhoid, and cholera from
river and sea water.

Nutrients

Photo: During crop-spraying, some chemicals will drain into the soil. Eventually, they seep into rivers and
other watercourses. Photo courtesy of US Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service
(ARS).

Suitably treated and used in moderate quantities, sewage can be a

fertilizer: it returns important nutrients to the environment, such as
nitrogen and phosphorus, which plants and animals need for growth. The
trouble is, sewage is often released in much greater quantities than the
natural environment can cope with. Chemical fertilizers used by farmers
also add nutrients to the soil, which drain into rivers and seas and add to
the fertilizing effect of the sewage. Together, sewage and fertilizers can
cause a massive increase in the growth of algae or plankton that
overwhelms huge areas of oceans, lakes, or rivers. This is known as
a harmful algal bloom (also known as an HAB or red tide, because it
can turn the water red). It is harmful because it removes oxygen from the
water that kills other forms of life, leading to what is known as a dead
zone. The Gulf of Mexico has one of the world's most spectacular dead
zones. Each summer, according to studies by the NOAA, it grows to an
area of around 5500–6000 square miles (14,000–15,500 square
kilometers), which is about the same size as the state of Connecticut.

Waste water

A few statistics illustrate the scale of the problem that waste water
(chemicals washed down drains and discharged from factories) can
cause. Around half of all ocean pollution is caused by sewage and waste
water. Each year, the world generates perhaps 5–10 billion tons of
industrial waste, much of which is pumped untreated into rivers, oceans,
and other waterways. [8] In the United States alone, around 400,000
factories take clean water from rivers, and many pump polluted waters
back in their place. However, there have been major improvements in
waste water treatment recently. Since 1970, in the United States, the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has invested about $70 billion in
improving water treatment plants that, as of 2015, serve around 88
percent of the US population (compared to just 69 percent in 1972).
However, another $271 billion is still needed to update and upgrade the
system.[15]

Factories are point sources of water pollution, but quite a lot of water is
polluted by ordinary people from nonpoint sources; this is how ordinary
water becomes waste water in the first place. Virtually everyone pours
chemicals of one sort or another down their drains or toilets.
Even detergents used in washing machines and dishwasherseventually
end up in our rivers and oceans. So do the pesticides we use on our
gardens. A lot of toxic pollution also enters waste water from
highway runoff. Highways are typically covered with a cocktail of toxic
chemicals—everything from spilled fuel and brake fluids to bits of worn
tires (themselves made from chemical additives) and exhaust emissions.
When it rains, these chemicals wash into drains and rivers. It is not
unusual for heavy summer rainstorms to wash toxic chemicals into rivers
in such concentrations that they kill large numbers of fish overnight. It has
been estimated that, in one year, the highway runoff from a single large
city leaks as much oil into our water environment as a typical tanker spill.
Some highway runoff runs away into drains; others can pollute
groundwater or accumulate in the land next to a road, making it
increasingly toxic as the years go by.

Chemical waste

Detergents are relatively mild substances. At the opposite end of the

spectrum are highly toxic chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls
(PCBs). They were once widely used to manufacture electronic circuit
boards, but their harmful effects have now been recognized and their use
is highly restricted in many countries. Nevertheless, an estimated half
million tons of PCBs were discharged into the environment during the
20th century. [9] In a classic example of transboundary pollution, traces of
PCBs have even been found in birds and fish in the Arctic. They were
carried there through the oceans, thousands of miles from where they
originally entered the environment. Although PCBs are widely banned,
their effects will be felt for many decades because they last a long time in
the environment without breaking down.

Another kind of toxic pollution comes from heavy metals, such as lead,
cadmium, and mercury. Lead was once commonly used in gasoline
(petrol), though its use is now restricted in some countries. Mercury and
cadmium are still used in batteries (though some brands now use other
metals instead). Until recently, a highly toxic chemical called tributyltin
(TBT) was used in paints to protect boats from the ravaging effects of the
oceans. Ironically, however, TBT was gradually recognized as a pollutant:
boats painted with it were doing as much damage to the oceans as the
oceans were doing to the boats.

The best known example of heavy metal pollution in the oceans took
place in 1938 when a Japanese factory discharged a significant amount
of mercury metal into Minamata Bay, contaminating the fish stocks there.
It took a decade for the problem to come to light. By that time, many local
people had eaten the fish and around 2000 were poisoned. Hundreds of
people were left dead or disabled. [10]
Radioactive waste

People view radioactive waste with great alarm—and for good reason. At
high enough concentrations it can kill; in lower concentrations it can
cause cancers and other illnesses. The biggest sources of radioactive
pollution in Europe are two factories that reprocess waste fuel
from nuclear power plants: Sellafield on the north-west coast of Britain
and Cap La Hague on the north coast of France. Both discharge
radioactive waste water into the sea, which ocean currents then carry
around the world. Countries such as Norway, which lie downstream from
Britain, receive significant doses of radioactive pollution from Sellafield.
The Norwegian government has repeatedly complained that Sellafield
has increased radiation levels along its coast by 6–10 times. Both the
Irish and Norwegian governments continue to press for the plant's
closure.[11]

Oil pollution

Photo: Oil-tanker spills are the most spectacular forms of pollution and the ones that catch public
attention, but only a fraction of all water pollution happens this way. Photo courtesy of US Fish & Wildlife
Service Photo Library.

When we think of ocean pollution, huge black oil slicks often spring to
mind, yet these spectacular accidents represent only a tiny fraction of all
the pollution entering our oceans. Even considering oil by itself, tanker
spills are not as significant as they might seem: only 12 percent of the oil
that enters the oceans comes from tanker accidents; over 70 percent of
oil pollution at sea comes from routine shipping and from the oil people
pour down drains on land. [12] However, what makes tanker spills so
destructive is the sheer quantity of oil they release at once — in other
words, the concentration of oil they produce in one very localized part of
the marine environment. The biggest oil spill in recent years (and the
biggest ever spill in US waters) occurred when the tanker Exxon
Valdez broke up in Prince William Sound in Alaska in 1989. Around 12
million gallons (44 million liters) of oil were released into the pristine
wilderness—enough to fill your living room 800 times over! Estimates of
the marine animals killed in the spill vary from approximately 1000 sea
otters and 34,000 birds to as many as 2800 sea otters and 250,000 sea
birds. Several billion salmon and herring eggs are also believed to have
been destroyed. [13]

Plastics

If you've ever taken part in a community beach clean, you'll know

that plastic is far and away the most common substance that washes up
with the waves. There are three reasons for this: plastic is one of the most
common materials, used for making virtually every kind of manufactured
object from clothing to automobile parts; plastic is light and floats easily
so it can travel enormous distances across the oceans; most plastics are
not biodegradable (they do not break down naturally in the environment),
which means that things like plastic bottle tops can survive in the marine
environment for a long time. (A plastic bottle can survive an estimated
450 years in the ocean and plastic fishing line can last up to 600 years.)

While plastics are not toxic in quite the same way as poisonous
chemicals, they nevertheless present a major hazard to seabirds, fish,
and other marine creatures. For example, plastic fishing lines and other
debris can strangle or choke fish. (This is sometimes called ghost
fishing.) About half of all the world's seabird species are known to have
eaten plastic residues. In one study of 450 shearwaters in the North
Pacific, over 80 percent of the birds were found to contain plastic residues
in their stomachs. In the early 1990s, marine scientist Tim Benton
collected debris from a 2km (1.5 mile) length of beach in the remote
Pitcairn islands in the South Pacific. His study recorded approximately a
thousand pieces of garbage including 268 pieces of plastic, 71 plastic
bottles, and two dolls heads. [14]

Alien species

Most people's idea of water pollution involves things like sewage, toxic
metals, or oil slicks, but pollution can be biological as well as chemical. In
some parts of the world, alien species are a major problem. Alien species
(sometimes known as invasive species) are animals or plants from one
region that have been introduced into a different ecosystem where they
do not belong. Outside their normal environment, they have no natural
predators, so they rapidly run wild, crowding out the usual animals or
plants that thrive there. Common examples of alien species include zebra
mussels in the Great Lakes of the USA, which were carried there from
Europe by ballast water (waste water flushed from ships). The
Mediterranean Sea has been invaded by a kind of alien algae
called Caulerpa taxifolia. In the Black Sea, an alien jellyfish
called Mnemiopsis leidyi reduced fish stocks by 90 percent after arriving
in ballast water. In San Francisco Bay, Asian clams called Potamocorbula
amurensis, also introduced by ballast water, have dramatically altered the
ecosystem. In 1999, Cornell University's David Pimentel estimated that
alien invaders like this cost the US economy $123 billion a year.

Photo: Invasive species: Above: Water hyacinth crowding out a waterway around an old fence post.
Photo by Steve Hillebrand. Below: Non-native zebra musselsclumped on a native mussel. Both photos
courtesy of US Fish & Wildlife Service Photo Library.

Other forms of pollution

These are the most common forms of pollution—but by no means the

only ones. Heat or thermal pollution from factories and power plants
also causes problems in rivers. By raising the temperature, it reduces the
amount of oxygen dissolved in the water, thus also reducing the level of
aquatic life that the river can support.

Another type of pollution involves the disruption of sediments (fine-

grained powders) that flow from rivers into the sea. Dams built for
hydroelectric power or water reservoirs can reduce the sediment flow.
This reduces the formation of beaches, increases coastal erosion (the
natural destruction of cliffs by the sea), and reduces the flow of nutrients
from rivers into seas (potentially reducing coastal fish stocks). Increased
sediments can also present a problem. During construction work, soil,
rock, and other fine powders sometimes enters nearby rivers in large
quantities, causing it to become turbid (muddy or silted). The extra
sediment can block the gills of fish, effectively suffocating them.
Construction firms often now take precautions to prevent this kind of
pollution from happening.

What are the effects of water pollution?

Some people believe pollution is an inescapable result of human activity:

they argue that if we want to have factories, cities, ships, cars, oil, and
coastal resorts, some degree of pollution is almost certain to result. In
other words, pollution is a necessary evil that people must put up with if
they want to make progress. Fortunately, not everyone agrees with this
view. One reason people have woken up to the problem of pollution is
that it brings costs of its own that undermine any economic benefits that
come about by polluting.

Take oil spills, for example. They can happen if tankers are too poorly
built to survive accidents at sea. But the economic benefit of
compromising on tanker quality brings an economic cost when an oil spill
occurs. The oil can wash up on nearby beaches, devastate the
ecosystem, and severely affect tourism. The main problem is that the
people who bear the cost of the spill (typically a small coastal community)
are not the people who caused the problem in the first place (the people
who operate the tanker). Yet, arguably, everyone who puts gasoline
(petrol) into their car—or uses almost any kind of petroleum-fueled
transport—contributes to the problem in some way. So oil spills are a
problem for everyone, not just people who live by the coast and tanker
operates.

Sewage is another good example of how pollution can affect us all.

Sewage discharged into coastal waters can wash up on beaches and
cause a health hazard. People who bathe or surf in the water can fall ill if
they swallow polluted water—yet sewage can have other harmful effects
too: it can poison shellfish (such as cockles and mussels) that grow near
the shore. People who eat poisoned shellfish risk suffering from an
acute—and sometimes fatal—illness called paralytic shellfish poisoning.
Shellfish is no longer caught along many shores because it is simply too
polluted with sewage or toxic chemical wastes that have discharged from
the land nearby.

Pollution matters because it harms the environment on which people

depend. The environment is not something distant and separate from our
lives. It's not a pretty shoreline hundreds of miles from our homes or a
wilderness landscape that we see only on TV. The environment is
everything that surrounds us that 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.

How can we stop water pollution?

There is no easy way to solve water pollution; if there were, it wouldn't 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.

Education

Making people aware of the problem is the first step to solving it. In the
early 1990s, when surfers in Britain grew tired of catching illnesses from
water polluted with sewage, they formed a group called Surfers Against
Sewage to force governments and water companies to clean up their act.
People who've grown tired of walking the world's polluted beaches often
band together to organize community beach-cleaning sessions. Anglers
who no longer catch so many fish have campaigned for tougher penalties
against factories that pour pollution into our rivers. Greater public
awareness can make a positive difference.

Laws

One of the biggest problems with water pollution is its transboundary

nature. Many rivers cross countries, while seas span whole continents.
Pollution discharged by factories in one country with poor environmental
standards can cause problems in neighboring nations, even when they
have tougher laws and higher standards. Environmental laws can make it
tougher for people to pollute, but to be really effective they have to
operate across national and international borders. This is why we have
international laws governing the oceans, such as the 1982 UN
Convention on the Law of the Sea (signed by over 120 nations), the
1972 London (Dumping) Convention, the 1978 MARPOL International
Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships, and the
1998 OSPAR Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of
the North East Atlantic. The European Union has water-protection laws
(known as directives) that apply to all of its member states. They include
the 1976 Bathing Water Directive (updated 2006), which seeks to ensure
the quality of the waters that people use for recreation. Most countries
also have their own water pollution laws. In the United States, for
example, there is the 1972 Clean Water Act and the 1974 Safe Drinking
Water Act.

Economics

Most environmental experts agree that the best way to tackle pollution is
through something called the polluter pays principle. This means that
whoever causes pollution should have to pay to clean it up, one way or
another. Polluter pays can operate in all kinds of ways. It could mean that
tanker owners should have to take out insurance that covers the cost of
oil spill cleanups, for example. It could also mean that shoppers should
have to pay for their plastic grocery bags, as is now common in Ireland, to
encourage recycling and minimize waste. Or it could mean that factories
that use rivers must have their water inlet pipes downstream of their
effluent outflow pipes, so if they cause pollution they themselves are the
first people to suffer. Ultimately, the polluter pays principle is designed to
deter people from polluting by making it less expensive for them to
behave in an environmentally responsible way.

Our clean future

Life is ultimately about choices—and so is pollution. We can live with

sewage-strewn beaches, dead rivers, and fish that are too poisonous to
eat. Or we can work together to keep the environment clean so the
plants, animals, and people who depend on it remain healthy. We can
take individual action to help reduce water pollution, for example, by using
environmentally friendly detergents, not pouring oil down drains, reducing
pesticides, and so on. We can take community action too, by helping out
on beach cleans or litter picks to keep our rivers and seas that little bit
cleaner. And we can take action as countries and continents to pass laws
that will make pollution harder and the world less polluted. Working
together, we can make pollution less of a problem—and the world a better
place.