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The Causes of Water Pollution - Coggle Diagram
The Causes of Water Pollution
Agriculture
Farming and livestock use about 70% of the earth’s water supplies.
Around the world, agriculture is the leading cause of water degradation.
Every time it rains, fertilizers, pesticides, and animal waste from farms and livestock operations wash nutrients and pathogens—such bacteria and viruses—into our waterways.
Nutrient pollution, caused by excess nitrogen and phosphorus in water or air, is the number-one threat to water quality worldwide and can cause algal blooms, a toxic soup of blue-green algae that can be harmful to people and wildlife.
In the United States, agricultural pollution is the top source of contamination in rivers and streams, the second-biggest source in wetlands, and the third main source in lakes.
Sewage and Wastewater
The term also includes stormwater runoff, which occurs when rainfall carries road salts, oil, grease, chemicals, and debris from impermeable surfaces into our waterways
More than 80 percent of the world’s wastewater flows back into the environment without being treated or reused, according to the United Nations.
Used water is wastewater. It comes from our sinks, showers, and toilets (think sewage) and from commercial, industrial, and agricultural activities (think metals, solvents, and toxic sludge).
In the United States, wastewater treatment facilities process about 34 billion gallons of wastewater per day.
According to EPA estimates, our nation’s aging and easily overwhelmed sewage treatment systems also release more than 850 billion gallons of untreated wastewater each year.
These facilities reduce the amount of pollutants such as pathogens, phosphorus, and nitrogen in sewage, as well as heavy metals and toxic chemicals in industrial waste, before discharging the treated waters back into waterways.
Industrial Waste
Many industrial sites produce waste in the form of toxic chemicals and pollutants, and some don’t have proper waste management systems in place, because of this industrial waste is dumped into nearby freshwater systems.
The toxic chemicals leached from this waste can make the water unsafe for human consumption, and they can also cause the temperature in freshwater systems to change, making them dangerous for marine life.
industrial waste can cause dead zones, which are areas of water that contain so little oxygen that marine life cannot survive in them.
Chemical waste
in the water systems is responsible for the negative changes in marine life development and their body systems by affecting their tissue matter and growth.
Marine Dumping and Plastic Pollution
Research has found that should this rate of pollution continue, the amount of ocean plastics will grow to 29 million metric tons per year by 2040.
The damage to wildlife habitats and to life on land is incalculable compared to the plastic pollution rate.
Currently, about 11 million metric tons of plastic make their way into the oceans each year.
Most items collected and dumped into oceans by many countries can take anywhere from two to 200 years to decompose completely.
Microplastics and ordinary plastics are being passed through the
marine animal food chain
These contaminants are toxic to aquatic life—most often reducing an organism’s life span and ability to reproduce—and make their way up the food chain as predator eats prey.
Oil Waste
Nearly half of the estimated 1 million tons of oil that makes its way into marine environments each year does not come from tanker spills, but from land-based sources such as factories, farms, and cities.
Big spills may dominate headlines, but consumers account for the vast majority of oil pollution in our seas, including oil and gasoline that drips from millions of cars and trucks every day.
Oil is naturally released from under the ocean floor through fractures known as seeps.
Big spills can be difficult to clean up completely from water ways due to how oil thins and spreads through
water.
