How do we know when water is polluted?

Some forms of water pollution are very obvious: everyone has seen TVnews footage of
oil slicks filmed from helicoptersflying 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
Organizationestimated 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 detergentsused in washing machines anddishwashers eventually
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 andbrake 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 electroniccircuit 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 aslead, 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]