Pollution Prevention  


Fighting pollution worldwide

Can any chemical be considered "safe?"

POPs

WWF targets endocrine disruptors

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Table of Contents


        
The Impacts of Pollution on the Environment

Climate change might seem to have nothing in common with the case of a beluga whale that has both male and female sex organs. Yet both phenomena are effects of pollution, and they illustrate how wide-ranging, fundamental, and disturbing those effects can be.

     Take water, the basic requirement for life on Earth. Everywhere industrial and agricultural practices exacerbate the problem of water quality. Waterways become recipients for waste and effluent. Even groundwater, once considered relatively safe from pollution from human activity, is widely contaminated. Agricultural pesticides - all toxic, many highly persistent - leach into water and soil. Overuse of fertilizer leads to eutrophication (over-concentration of plant nutrients), making water dangerous to drink and killing aquatic life.

Industrial activity, from oil-refining and plastics manufacture to textile production, has resulted in the large-scale production and emission of synthetic chemicals, many of which are suspected carcinogens and highly persistent. Mining and smelting let toxins such as lead, mercury, arsenic, and cadmium escape from the earth's crust into the environment and the food chain. There have been episodes of mass poisoning, both directly - for example by mercury leakage in Japan, and indirectly - through the consumption of fish contaminated with mercury.

Smelting can also release toxic trace metals into the atmosphere. Both industrial and agricultural processes are implicated in acid precipitation, which can destroy forests and render fresh water unfit for life.

Cancer, birth defects, cardiac and chronic bronchial damage are among the most familiar examples of physical impairment in humans and wildlife with which the effects of pollution are reliably linked. Now, evidence is accumulating that many chemicals can cause endocrine disruption, which may yet prove the most intractable of the problems that threaten biodiversity.

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