Water pollution has become a global crisis, and here in America it has begun to take over our water resources, however; the problem can be reversed through filtration, floating trash collectors, and waste management. In recent years our water has become polluted with oils, plastics, waste, and more. This has created dead zones in our water sources and has affected marine life in addition to the animals that consume them. If we cannot get the problem under control soon we may lose the ability to hunt marine life completely, and the varying species will go extinct. It has also affected our beaches, and some beaches have been shut down because the water has been too polluted to have people swim in. The bright side is that it is not too late, and if we start being more careful with how we treat our water then we can start to reverse the problems that we have already caused.
A major problem we have is letting unfiltered forms of waste enter our water systems. When we allow untreated runoff, groundwater, and storm water to enter bigger bodies of water, then they pollute the water with pesticides, fertilizers, and garbage. The polluted water depletes the amount of nutrients that the aquatic life needs to survive. So, then we see species struggling to survive in their natural habitats. In fact, “Over 1.2 trillion gallons of untreated sewage, groundwater, and industrial waste are discharged into U.S. waters annually.” (Hearn) and this directly affects the way that we must monitor wildlife’s ability to survive.
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The easiest way to solve the problem is to simply be more responsible with the way that we use pollutants around our water, but this is very hard to enforce. Instead, we can all take small steps to make a bigger change. If we work to limit the amount of storm water runoff by seeding and maintaining our lawns or other surrounding grassy areas, then we can slow the flow of runoff into the water. We can combine our efforts of limiting the amount of runoff with filtering the rest, and that can completely minimize the amount of runoff that reaches our water system. Oil also finds its way into our water which is very hard to contain once it has gotten out, but there are ways to do it. “To stop an oil spill in water from spreading, floating containment booms are designed to block the spread of oil and contain it to a manageable area. Once contained, oil skimmers can be used to remove the oil that floats on the water.” (Erosion Pollution), because if we don’t the leftover oil will become sludge that marine life will consume, cling to birds, choke fish, and block sunlight for the plant life that needs to survive. This one mistake will completely affect an entire ecosystem in the blink of an eye.
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Plastics are completely filling our oceans and freshwater resources, and “By 2050, it's estimated the oceans will contain more plastic than fish, by weight.” (Martin). Plastic is one of the main pollutants in our water ways. Humans waste a large percentage of the plastic that is produced, and only a small amount of the plastic that is produced is later recycled. Once plastics enter the water they can completely ruin entire ecosystems. They release chemicals into the water which poison the marine life, and it chokes water fowl that hunt in the water. At the end of the cycle humans are affected, we will no longer be able to consume fish if we continue to poison them and it’ll be harder to filter water because of the amounts of pollutants in it. Humans litter, throwing plastics into storm drains and on the ground, eventually those same plastics end up in our fresh water resources and oceans.
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People have proposed ideas to create machines that will collect the plastics from the ocean, but they are only in prototype form. One idea is to create a one-hundred-kilometer-long screen to span between Hawaii and California because it is one of the largest plastic deposits. Generally, plastics leave the west coast and gulf near Texas to get caught in gyres that carry the plastics around to the rest of the world. The screen floats and is only two meters deep to avoid capturing marine life like nets can do. The V-shaped screen would be a large step in the right direction to eliminate the refuse that harbors our water, it is projected to collect sixty-eight kilograms of refuse. This proposal has over one-hundred fifty thousand backers, and they plan on having a finished product by the year 2020. The answer isn’t to simply recycle the plastics that we use, because that is more harmful than you may think. Plastic is hard to clean, and all the impurities do not leave the plastic in the cleaning process. Biodegradable plastics help, but they aren’t marine friendly either. The only true way to end the plastic pollution is to ween our way off it, buy plastics in bulk, and to eliminate single use plastics.
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Since the invention of nuclear energy, there has been a problem containing the waste that it produces. It seems like each decade we have a nuclear reaction explosion, or we find out that nuclear waste has been dumped in our water. That waste poisons our drinking water, fish, and later down the road affects our children. Nuclear poisoning can cause cancers and birth defects in later generations, if parents are exposed the descendants will be affected at some point. Humans use different forms of nuclear energy for power, weapons, and heat.
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“More than half of Americans could be drinking tap water tainted with a radioactive element. A new report from the nonprofit Environmental Working Group (EWG) finds more than 170 million people are exposed to radium in their drinking water. That could increase the risk of cancer. EWG collected data from public water systems around the country and analyzed five years of tests from 2010 to 2015. Radium was found in all 50 states – and the group found 158 public water systems in 27 states ‘reported radium in amounts that exceeded the federal legal limit.’” (CBS)
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We can limit the effects of radiation contamination with reverse osmosis and activated carbon. Reverse osmosis causes water to force itself through extremely small pores which eliminates the impurities from the water. Activated carbon absorbs impurities from water and still clean water to flow through it. Companies would have to collect large amounts of water filter and then replace to remove the radiation. The process might be long, but it’s worth it in the end.