Marine Anthropogenic Litter
Reports of plastics in the marine environment began to appear in the early 1970s.
At the time, Edward Carpenter of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution speculated
that the problem was likely to get worse and that toxic, non-polymeric compounds
in plastics known as plasticizers could be delivered to marine organisms as
a potential effect. Carpenter’s speculations were correct and probably more so than
he imagined. The quantity of plastics in ocean waters has increased enormously,
and toxic plastic additives, as well as toxicants concentrated by plastics from the
surrounding sea water, have been documented in many marine species
Chapter 11 ... Modeling the Role of Microplastics in Bioaccumulation of Organic Chemicals to Marine Aquatic Organisms. A Critical Review ... Albert A. Koelmans
EPA-pollution-standards-epa-plan-summary-June-2014
Air pollution standards for electic power generation in the USA being proposed by EPA, June 2014
'http://truevaluemetrics.org/DBpdfs/Environmental-Protection/EPA-pollution-standards-epa-plan-summary-June-2014.pdf'
West Oakland ...Clearing-the-Air-Study ... 2003
West Oakland residents face dangerous amounts of diesel soot in the air: Some West Oakland residents are exposed to roughly five times more diesel particulates than residents in other parts of Oakland. West Oakland residents may have an increased risk of one extra cancer per 1,000 residents due to diesel particulate exposure over a lifetime.
There is far more diesel pollution in West Oakland than in the rest of the State/Region: There are 6 times more diesel particulates emitted per person and over 90 times more diesel particulates per square mile per year in West Oakland than in the State of California.2
'http://truevaluemetrics.org/DBpdfs/Place/WestOakland/WestOakland-clearing-the-air-study.pdf'
AlJazeera English ... Opinion ... Who pollutes: The rich or the poor?
India's prime minister Modi is allowing India's environment to be destroyed in order to cater to powerful foreign investors.
Privatising profit and natural resources, socialising pollution
Polluted Water
Polluted water is everywhere ... almost always the result of bad human behavior at both the consumer level and during the manufacture of producs
Polluted waterway ... all sorts of discarded junk
Solid waste ... all sort of detritus in a small watercourse. This sort of pollution is all over the United States, and is much worse around cities in poor developing countries.
Polluted water ... all sorts of disolved toxins
Building on prior studies largely in Europe in 1999−2000 the USGS Toxics program surveyed 139 stream sites across the U.S. using five target-organic-chemical methods (95 total organic waste analytes; geospatial-chemical space of 13k cells). This study established the ubiquity and corresponding geospatial importance of organic contaminants of emerging concern as potential drivers of aquatic-ecosystem and downstream human health in the U.S.47 The Kolpin et al. study10 also provided one of the earliest glimpses into the complexity of surface water organic-contaminant mixtures, despite the fact that comprehensive chemical characterization was not a study objective and methods for some well established environmental-contaminant classes (e.g., pesticides and VOC) were not included
The Deer Island wastewater treatment plant was the centerpiece of a project to clean up the Boston Harbor. It wasn’t fully operational until 2000. Doc Searls/flickr, CC BY
Ubiquitous Pollution
Polluted water is everywhere ... almost always the result of bad human behavior at both the consumer level and during the manufacture of products
New Delhi’s Yamuna River, like much of India’s water, is polluted. The world urgently needs low-carbon ways to clean things up. EPA/Harish Tyagi
Many Chinese waterways are severely polluted. EPA/DIEGO AZUBEL/AAP
Issue ... Clean water and sanitation / Climate impact
Let’s make sure that cleaning up the world’s water doesn’t send our climate targets down the gurgler
Olympic rowers train in waters near Rio. The lack of sufficient treatment has raised health concerns for athletes. Carlos Barria/Reuters
News about the sewage and pollution in Guanabara Bay in Rio have caused health concerns among Olympic athletes. Ricardo Moraes/Reuters
Millions of dollars were spent to clean up the trash and treat sewage in the waterways around Rio before the Olympics, but water quality remains a worry. Ricardo Moraes/Reuters
Data about global Human Waste situation
Massive problem largely ignored based on allocation of financial resources
Human Waste
Managed well in mature rich economies, but a huge problem in poor developing countries
The largest circles show the countries most in need of sanitation. World Bank
Human Waste
The SFD, or shit flow diagram, for Dhaka, Bangladesh shows that nearly all of waste is released into the environment untreated. World Water Week,
Human waste increases as population increases. With more than 7 billion people on the planet the volume of human waste is around 3 million metric tons per day!
(Based on a population of around 7 billion and feces production per person of around 1lb per person per day!)
Public latrine in China ... a community near Beijing
Because installing centralized sewage treatment plants is expensive and plants do not expand quickly to match population growth, alternative methods such as regular waste collection businesses are needed. gtzecosan/flickr, CC BY
A technology initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ... conversion to biochar
Plastic in the Oceans
Between 1950 and 2015, an estimated 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic have been produced globally, and 75% of this plastic has been thrown away. A large percentage of this waste has ended up in the world’s oceans, creating the problem that is so graphically shown in Power’s photos.
STATE OF GLOBAL AIR / 2018
A SPECIAL REPORT ON GLOBAL EXPOSURE TO AIR POLLUTION AND ITS DISEASE BURDEN (24 pages)
'http://truevaluemetrics.org/DBpdfs/Pollution/AirPollution/State-of-Global-Air-2018.pdf'
Rules and Regulations for Environmental Responsibility
Until quite recently there virtually no rules and regulations to ensure that economic actors were environmentally responsible. Essentially, it was 'laissez faire' ... anything goes ... and as long as it was profitable , then I am going to do be done. For most of the industrial revolution, environmental pollution was awful.
TPB aside: As a young child I spent many Christmas and Easter holidays staying with my grandparents who lived in Wakefield in the West Riding of Yorkshire, in the industrial North of England ... a huge contrast from our home in Okehampton, a small agricultural market town in the middle of Devonshire. I remember being told 'where there's muck, there's money' and being told that it was a good sign when the chimneys of the textile mills were spewing dark black smoke and a bad sign when they weren't. Everything was covered in grime ... soot from the smoke. And of course, we burnt coal to keep ourselves warm. and in fact, also cooked on a huge coal fired range!
Post War Europe
In the immediate years after WWII Europe started to work on cleaning up the pollution in the great rivers like the Rhine.
United States
Industrial pollution was not addressed in the United States until the early 1970s. It was President Richard Nixon that established the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and steps started to be taken to clean up the water pollution and the air pollution. California and particlarly Los Angeles was faced with terrible air pollution from automobiles and took the lead in requiring catalytic converters to limit the nitrous oxides from vehicle tail pipes. It is remarkable that President Trump is leading the charge in the United States to roll back environmental regulations and allow all sorts of environmentally irresponsible behavior.
TO DO ... the images have to be made more relevant to the subject matter
L0700-SJ-The-Trump-Presidency
Identifying the World’s Top Corporate Plastic Polluters
For the second year in a row, Coca Cola came in as #1 Top Global Polluter.
'http://truevaluemetrics.org/DBpdfs/Pollution/Corporate-Plastic-Polluters-17554.pdf'
