Water. Life can’t be sustained without this crucial source. It is used for drinking (a necessity for survival), a necessity for growing food and for animals (a source of food), sanitation purposes, and cooking. As you can see, our world relies on water, but this society continues to pollute and trash this mandatory resource.

Dirty water is the “world’s biggest health risk”, and is baleful to our quality of life. When water runs over roofs and down roads, it picks up toxic chemicals, dirt, trash, and disease-carrying organisms, contaminating our water sources (www.nrdc.org). When we drink harmful water we increase our chance of arsenicosis, cholera, fluorosis, HIV/AIDs, malaria, and much more (www.unicef.org). Domestic households produce a large amount of sewage as well that contaminate our waters such as urine, faeces, and laundry waste. Marine dumping is a factor as well in the pollution of our waters. This may lead to the killing of sea creatures (www.water-pollution.org.uk).

Factories all over the world damage the environment through many ways like thermal, chemical, air and noise pollution. Thermal pollution is when warm water is dumped into cooler water in a river, pond, lake, or bay. The difference in temperature may cause algae growth, killing of native fish/wildlife, and an unhealthy change in water temperature. Chemical pollution is when harmful chemicals are exposed to the environment (wiki.answers.com). For years large scale companies in America have been dumping toxic chemicals into rivers and into the ground. These toxic chemicals seep into the Earth intoxicating aquifers (America the Not-So Beautiful by Andrew A. Rooney). For example the Burgana River. This once beautiful river was trashed by the release of chemical waste from mills and factories (www.takepart.com). As well as large scale factories, oceans are polluted on a daily basis by oil spills. Oil spills make up around 12% of the oil that goes in to the ocean. These disastrous oil spills also harm the marine life of that region. This creates a thick sludge in the water that suffocates fish, gets caught in the feathers of birds, and block light from photosynthetic aquatic plants (www.water-polution.org.uk). About 1 billion people rely on fish globally as their primary animal protein source (www.msc.org). When the population of fish decreases, that unhinges the food change.

Atmospheric deposition, or more commonly known as “acid rain” starts in the atmosphere when water particles combine with carbon dioxide (C02), sulphur dioxide (SO2), and nitrogen oxide (NO). This combination forms a weak acid. Water vapor then absorbs more of these gases and becomes more acidic. When it rains, these pernicious gases invade the Earth and waters (www. water-polution.org.uk).

In conclusion, one of the most important resources we have on Earth is being polluted. There are some natural causes that cause pollution, but most are man-made. If the water source is gone in the future, humanity is to blame. Hopefully generations from now, people will still have beautiful, serene oceans instead of dirty water.