Ancient cultures
Air pollution has always accompanied civilizations. Pollution started from prehistoric times when man created the first fires. According to a 1983 article in the journal
Science, "
soot found on ceilings of prehistoric caves provides ample evidence of the high levels of pollution that was associated with inadequate ventilation of open fires."
[2] Metal
forging appears to be a key turning point in the creation of significant air pollution levels outside the home. Core samples of glaciers in Greenland indicate increases in pollution associated with Greek, Roman and Chinese metal production,
[3] but at that time the pollution was comparatively small and could be handled by nature.
Urban pollution
Air pollution in the US, 1973
The burning of coal and wood, and the presence of many horses in concentrated areas made the cities the cesspools of pollution. The Industrial Revolution brought an infusion of untreated chemicals and wastes into local streams that served as the water supply.
King Edward I of England banned the burning of sea-coal by proclamation in
London in 1272, after its smoke became a problem.
[4][5] But the fuel was so common in England that this earliest of names for it was acquired because it could be carted away from some shores by the wheelbarrow.
It was the
industrial revolution that gave birth to environmental pollution as we know it today. London also recorded one of the earlier extreme cases of water quality problems with the
Great Stink on the
Thames of 1858, which led to construction of the
London sewerage system soon afterward. Pollution issues escalated as population growth far exceeded view ability of neighborhoods to handle their waste problem. Reformers began to demand sewer systems, and clean water.
[6]
In 1870, the sanitary conditions in Berlin were among the worst in Europe.
August Bebel recalled conditions before a modern
sewer system was built in the late 1870s:
- "Waste-water from the houses collected in the gutters running alongside the curbs and emitted a truly fearsome smell. There were no public toilets in the streets or squares. Visitors, especially women, often became desperate when nature called. In the public buildings the sanitary facilities were unbelievably primitive....As a metropolis, Berlin did not emerge from a state of barbarism into civilization until after 1870."[7]
The primitive conditions were intolerable for a world national capital, and the Imperial German government brought in its scientists, engineers and urban planners to not only solve the deficiencies but to forge Berlin as the world's model city. A British expert in 1906 concluded that Berlin represented "the most complete application of science, order and method of public life," adding "it is a marvel of civic administration, the most modern and most perfectly organized city that there is."
[8]
The emergence of great factories and consumption of immense quantities of coal gave rise to unprecedented
air pollution and the large volume of industrial chemical discharges added to the growing load of untreated human waste. Chicago and Cincinnati were the first two American cities to enact laws ensuring cleaner air in 1881. Pollution became a major issue in the United States in the early twentieth century, as
progressive reformers took issue with air pollution caused by coal burning, water pollution caused by bad sanitation, and street pollution caused by the 3 million horses who worked in American cities in 1900, generating large quantities of urine and manure. As historian Martin Melosi notes, The generation that first saw automobiles replacing the horses saw cars as "miracles of cleanliness.".
[9] By the 1940s, however, automobile-caused smog was a major issue in Los Angeles.
[10]
Other cities followed around the country until early in the 20th century, when the short lived Office of Air Pollution was created under the Department of the Interior. Extreme smog events were experienced by the cities of
Los Angeles and
Donora, Pennsylvania in the late 1940s, serving as another public reminder.
[11] Air pollution would continue to be a problem in England, especially later during the industrial revolution, and extending into the recent past with the
Great Smog of 1952.
Awareness of atmospheric pollution spread widely after World War II, with fears triggered by reports of radioactive fallout from atomic warfare and testing.
[12] Then a non-nuclear event, The
Great Smog of 1952 in London, killed at least 4000 people.
[13] This prompted some of the first major modern environmental legislation, The
Clean Air Act of 1956.
Severe incidents of pollution helped increase consciousness.
PCB dumping in the
Hudson River resulted in a ban by the
EPAon consumption of its fish in 1974. Long-term
dioxin contamination at
Love Canal starting in 1947 became a national news story in 1978 and led to the
Superfund legislation of 1980.
[15] The pollution of industrial land gave rise to the name
brownfield, a term now common in
city planning.
The development of nuclear science introduced
radioactive contamination, which can remain lethally radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years.
Lake Karachay, named by the
Worldwatch Institute as the "most polluted spot" on earth, served as a disposal site for the Soviet Union throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Second place may go to the area of Chelyabinsk Russian as the "Most polluted place on the planet".
[16]
Nuclear weapons continued to be tested in the
Cold War, especially in the earlier stages of their development. The toll on the worst-affected populations and the growth since then in understanding about the critical threat to human health posed by
radioactivity has also been a prohibitive complication associated with
nuclear power. Though extreme care is practiced in that industry, the potential for disaster suggested by incidents such as those at
Three Mile Island and
Chernobyl pose a lingering specter of public mistrust. Worldwide publicity has been intense on those disasters.
[17] Widespread support for
test ban treaties has ended almost all nuclear testing in the atmosphere.
[18]
International catastrophes such as the wreck of the
Amoco Cadiz oil tanker off the coast of
Brittany in 1978 and the
Bhopal disaster in 1984 have demonstrated the universality of such events and the scale on which efforts to address them needed to engage. The borderless nature of atmosphere and oceans inevitably resulted in the implication of pollution on a planetary level with the issue of global warming. Most recently the term
persistent organic pollutant (POP) has come to describe a group of chemicals such as
PBDEs and
PFCs among others. Though their effects remain somewhat less well understood owing to a lack of experimental data, they have been detected in various ecological habitats far removed from industrial activity such as the Arctic, demonstrating diffusion and bioaccumulation after only a relatively brief period of widespread use.
A much more recently discovered problem is the
Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a huge concentration of plastics,
chemical sludge and other
debris which has been collected into a large area of the Pacific Ocean by the
North Pacific Gyre. This is a less well known pollution problem than the others described above, but nonetheless has multiple and serious consequences such as increasing wildlife mortality, the spread of invasive species and human ingestion of toxic chemicals. Organizations such as
5 Gyres have researched the pollution and, along with artists like
Marina DeBris, are working toward publicizing the issue.
Forms of pollution
The major forms of pollution are listed below along with the particular contaminant relevant to each of them:
- Light pollution: includes light trespass, over-illumination and astronomical interference.
- Littering: the criminal throwing of inappropriate man-made objects, unremoved, onto public and private properties.
- Noise pollution: which encompasses roadway noise, aircraft noise, industrial noise as well as high-intensity sonar.
- Soil contamination occurs when chemicals are released by spill or underground leakage. Among the most significant soil contaminants are hydrocarbons, heavy metals, MTBE,[19] herbicides, pesticides and chlorinated hydrocarbons.
- Radioactive contamination, resulting from 20th century activities in atomic physics, such as nuclear power generation and nuclear weapons research, manufacture and deployment. (See alpha emitters and actinides in the environment.)
- Thermal pollution, is a temperature change in natural water bodies caused by human influence, such as use of water as coolant in a power plant.
- Visual pollution, which can refer to the presence of overhead power lines, motorway billboards, scarred landforms (as fromstrip mining), open storage of trash, municipal solid waste or space debris.
- Water pollution, by the discharge of wastewater from commercial and industrial waste (intentionally or through spills) into surface waters; discharges of untreated domestic sewage, and chemical contaminants, such as chlorine, from treated sewage; release of waste and contaminants into surface runoff flowing to surface waters (including urban runoff and agricultural runoff, which may contain chemical fertilizers and pesticides); waste disposal and leaching into groundwater;eutrophication and littering.
- Plastic pollution: involves the accumulation of plastic products in the environment that adversely affects wildlife, wildlife habitat, or humans.
Pollutants
A pollutant is a waste material that pollutes air, water or soil. Three factors determine the severity of a pollutant: its chemical nature, the concentration and the persistence.
Cost of pollution
Pollution has cost. Manufacturing activities that cause
air pollution impose health and clean-up costs on the whole society, whereas the neighbors of an individual who chooses to fire-proof his home may benefit from a reduced risk of a fire spreading to their own houses. If external costs exist, such as pollution, the producer may choose to produce more of the product than would be produced if the producer were required to pay all associated environmental costs. Because responsibility or consequence for self-directed action lies partly outside the self, an element of
externalization is involved. If there are external benefits, such as in
public safety, less of the good may be produced than would be the case if the producer were to receive payment for the external benefits to others.
Sources and causes
Air pollution produced by ships may alter clouds, affecting global temperatures.
Air pollution comes from both natural and human-made (anthropogenic) sources. However, globally human-made pollutants from combustion, construction, mining, agriculture and warfare are increasingly significant in the air pollution equation.
[20]
Motor vehicle emissions are one of the leading causes of air pollution.
[21][22][23] China,
United States,
Russia,
India[24] Mexico, and
Japan are the world leaders in air pollution emissions. Principal stationary pollution sources include
chemical plants, coal-fired
power plants,
oil refineries,
[25] petrochemical plants,
nuclear waste disposal activity, incinerators, large livestock farms (dairy cows, pigs, poultry, etc.),
PVC factories, metals production factories, plastics factories, and other
heavy industry. Agricultural air pollution comes from contemporary practices which include clear felling and burning of natural vegetation as well as spraying of pesticides and herbicides
[26]
About 400 million metric tons of
hazardous wastes are generated each year.
[27] The
United States alone produces about 250 million metric tons.
[28] Americans constitute less than 5% of the
world's population, but produce roughly 25% of the world’s
CO2,
[29] and generate approximately 30% of
world’s waste.
[30][31] In 2007,
China has overtaken the United States as the world's biggest producer of CO
2,
[32] while still far behind based on per capita pollution - ranked 78th among the world's nations.
[33]
An industrial area, with a power plant, south of
Yangzhou's downtown,
China
In February 2007, a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), representing the work of 2,500 scientists, economists, and policymakers from more than 120 countries, said that humans have been the primary cause of global warming since 1950. Humans have ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions and avoid the consequences of global warming, a major climate report concluded. But to change the climate, the transition from fossil fuels like coal and oil needs to occur within decades, according to the final report this year from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
[34]
Some of the more common
soil contaminants are
chlorinated hydrocarbons (CFH),
heavy metals (such as
chromium,
cadmium–found in rechargeable
batteries, and
lead–found in lead
paint,
aviation fuel and still in some countries,
gasoline),
MTBE,
zinc,
arsenic and
benzene. In 2001 a series of press reports culminating in a book called
Fateful Harvest unveiled a widespread practice of recycling industrial byproducts into fertilizer, resulting in the contamination of the soil with various metals. Ordinary municipal
landfills are the source of many chemical substances entering the soil environment (and often groundwater), emanating from the wide variety of refuse accepted, especially substances illegally discarded there, or from pre-1970 landfills that may have been subject to little control in the U.S. or EU. There have also been some unusual releases of
polychlorinated dibenzodioxins, commonly called
dioxins for simplicity, such as
TCDD.
[35]
Pollution can also be the consequence of a natural disaster. For example,
hurricanes often involve water contamination from sewage, and
petrochemical spills from ruptured
boats or
automobiles. Larger scale and environmental damage is not uncommon when coastal
oil rigs or
refineries are involved. Some sources of pollution, such as
nuclear power plants or
oil tankers, can produce widespread and potentially hazardous releases when accidents occur.
In the case of
noise pollution the dominant source class is the
motor vehicle, producing about ninety percent of all unwanted noise worldwide.
Effects
Human health
Overview of main health effects on humans from some common types of pollution.
[36][37][38]
Adverse
air quality can kill many organisms including humans. Ozone pollution can cause
respiratory disease,
cardiovascular disease,
throat inflammation, chest pain, and
congestion. Water pollution causes approximately 14,000 deaths per day, mostly due to
contamination of drinking water by untreated
sewage in
developing countries. An estimated 500 million
Indians have no access to a proper toilet,
[39][40] Over ten million people in India fell ill with waterborne illnesses in 2013, and 1,535 people died, most of them children.
[41] Nearly 500 million Chinese lack access to safe drinking water.
[42] A 2010 analysis estimated that 1.2 million people died prematurely each year in
China because of air pollution.
[43] The
WHO estimated in 2007 that air pollution causes half a million deaths per year in India.
[44] Studies have estimated that the number of people killed annually in the United States could be over 50,000.
[45]
Environment
Pollution has been found to be present widely in the
environment. There are a number of effects of this:
Environmental health information
The Toxicology and Environmental Health Information Program (TEHIP)
[46] at the
United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) maintains a comprehensive toxicology and environmental health web site that includes access to resources produced by TEHIP and by other government agencies and organizations. This web site includes links to databases, bibliographies, tutorials, and other scientific and consumer-oriented resources. TEHIP also is responsible for the Toxicology Data Network (TOXNET)
[47] an integrated system of toxicology and environmental health databases that are available free of charge on the web.
Regulation and monitoring
To protect the environment from the adverse effects of pollution, many nations worldwide have enacted legislation to regulate various types of pollution as well as to mitigate the adverse effects of pollution.
Pollution control
A Mobile Pollution Check Vehicle in
India.
Pollution control is a term used in
environmental management. It means the control of
emissions and
effluents into air, water or soil. Without pollution control, the waste products from consumption, heating, agriculture, mining, manufacturing, transportation and other human activities, whether they accumulate or disperse, will degrade the
environment. In the hierarchy of controls,
pollution prevention and
waste minimization are more desirable than pollution control. In the field of
land development,
low impact development is a similar technique for the prevention of
urban runoff.
Practices
Pollution control devices