Environmental pollution and protection

WATER POLLUTION

      The sea waters today are very dangerous. There is no ocean or sea which is not used as a dump. The Pacific Ocean, especially, has suffered from nuclear pollution because the French Government tests nuclear weapons there. Many seas are used for dumping industrial and nuclear waste. Britain alone dumps 250,000 tons of industrial waste straight into the North Sea. This poisons and kills fish and sea animals. "Nuclear-poisoned” fish can be eaten by people.

     Many rivers and lakes are poisoned too. Fish and reptiles can’t live in them. There is not enough oxygen in the water. In such places all the birds leave their habitats and many plants die. If people drink this water, they can die too. It happens so because factories and plants produce a lot of waste and pour it into rivers. So they poison the water. Factories use clean water. After the water is used it becomes poison which goes back into rivers, lakes and seas.

  AIR POLLUTION

The first one is air pollution. Air is a substance we can’t live without. Our atmosphere consists of oxygen, ozone and carbon dioxide in a certain proportion. This proportion is ideal for healthy and comfortable breath and it shouldn’t be changed. Various contaminants in air violate the percentage of gases and add poisonous impurities. One of the most widely known drawbacks of air pollution is stratospheric ozone depletion, due to which the climate of our planet changes and terrible natural disasters happen more frequently. The major sources of pollution in big cities are exhaust gases of cars. Sulfur oxides may cause acid rains and many other bad things. Various plants and power stations exhaust harmful gases; excrete toxic metals, radioactive pollutants and ammonia. Accidents on manufactories and plants increase the pollution a million times. There is a solution for these problems: people should start using ecological friendly fuels, putting filter systems on factory chimneys and preventing accidents.
Thousands of smoky industrial enterprises all over the world pollute the air we breath, the water we drink, the land we live in. In the process of production and consumption different wastes are dumped into the atmosphere. They make the atmosphere a less hospitable habitat for animal life, they cause damage to plant life, and they are harmful for human beings. The main sources of air pollutant are automobiles and stationary combustion processes such as those used in generating electric power. Cars and factories pollute the air we use. Every car consumes many tons of air. Its exhaust gases contain poisonous substances which make difficult the emission of the earth's heat into space. Air pollution also destroys the ozone layer which protects the earth from dangerous light of the Sun.
Historically, air pollution comes from industries and transport. Factories, power stations and cars burn oil and coal. This rises into the air as different forms of sulphur and nitrogen. The sulphur and nitrogen combine with water in the air to make sulphuric or nitric acid. This falls to the ground as acid rain. We burn large quantities of coal and oil, and this creates millions of tonnes of acid rain. The wind carries the rain long distances, and this creates problems. One country makes acid rain, and it falls to the ground in another country, for example, Canada gets a lot of acid rain from the USA, and Norway gets a lot of acid rain from Britain. The greenhouse effect Industrial countries also cause the greenhouse effect (also called “global warming” or “climate change”). Burning coal and oil produces carbon dioxide (CO2). The (CO2) increases in the Earth’s atmosphere, and retains heat from the sun (it works like the glass in a greenhouse- it lets heat in, but doesn’t let the heat out). The Earth is getting hotter. Weather patterns are changing: some places have no water for years, and some places have floods. When a country has no water, the effects are very hard- in Chile in 1999, the result was electricity cuts around the country. There was no water for the hydro-electric power stations. Ozone layer depletion The ozone layer is a band of gas around the Earth. It protects us from dangerous ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun. It is vital to human and animal survival. Unfortunately, we are producing chemicals which destroy the ozone layer. The damage starts in the Antarctic and spreads. Sheep in the Magallanes are becoming blind because the ozone layer is thinner. In Australia, a lot of people are getting skin cancer from the sun

            Nuclear power stations can go wrong and cause nuclear pollution. This happened in Windscale in Britain, in Three Mile Island in the USA and Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union. Nuclear pollution cannot be seen but its effects can be terrible. To make air clean again we need good filters at nuclear power stations, at factories and plants and also in cars and buses.

      Both clean air and clean water are necessary for our health. If people want to survive, they must solve these problems quickly. Man is beginning to understand that his environment is not just his own town or country, but the whole earth. That’s why people all over the world think and speak so much about ecology. 

 

Water pollution is another important problem. The contamination of water ways comes from many sources: chemical waste from cities and towns. Sea- and river- going ships often pollute sea and river water with various oil products which create problems of contamination in various types of fish.

Land pollution results from the dumping of a wide variety of wastes on the terrain. Old cars, refrigerators, other machinery and appliances that are retired from use, rubbish the economy throws into it. Our forests are dying from acid rains. This, in turn, affects the balance of nature. As a result some rare species of animals, birds, fish and plants disappear forever. The most horrible ecological disaster was the Chernobyl tragedy in April 1986. As a result of it about 18 percent of the territory of Belarus were polluted with radioactive substances. A great damage has been done to the republic's agriculture, forests and people's health.