Week 08 - Edition 01 Topic
What are the major causes of pollution in your area? Are they vehicles, industries or just humans? Suggest ways in which this can be rectified.
According to Wikipedia, pollution is the introduction of contaminants into the natural environment that cause adverse change. All human activities ranging from the exploration of raw materials at their ores to the finished goods all have their respective dark sides.
Now, relative to my local area, it is safe to say that we humans are the one and only cause of pollution. This is largely because we are the ones who produce the other two – the vehicles and industries. But I will still itemize the effect of each of them. Starting from the vehicles that were produced to make transportation easier basically use fossil fuel to run. And it does not just run by mere pouring the fuel into the engine of course, the fuel is combusted and then somehow transmits the energy to the wheels of the vehicle. This combusted fuel produce a by-product of harmful gases such as carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, etc. which are very harmful to the respiratory system of humans and animals.
In the aspect of industries, they also use fuel to run powerful engines for the production of goods. Apart from that, most of these industries deal with raw materials which has some parts that are not useful. These un-useful parts when not properly taken care of constitute a large sum of environmental pollution and affects the climate over time. For example, a company that produce plastic chairs, after moulding the products do rinse them with water. Some of the residual chemicals and heat go into the water and then released into the environment. The heat in the water dissipates into the atmosphere and in turn increases the average temperature of the environment. Now, imagine this with thousands of industries present!
Humans, being the bane behind of all these creations, basically still pollute the environment with their day-to-day activities. Still using my local region as a case study, we still have people who still do things in primitive ways. There are cases of bush burning especially during the dry season, which dissipates harmful gases which linger in the environment. Even waste disposals are not yet off the stage of being dumped in waters during rainy times. These wastes gather at some other points far from where it was launched, end up blocking drainage systems. And upon decaying, at times in stagnant waters, creates breeding places for mosquitoes and oozes offensive odous to the environment.
Although I know at times we cannot entirely blame individuals, there could be the possibility of no drainage system, ineffective waste disposals, epileptic power supply, etc. Yes, I forgot to add - individuals and companies use fossil fuels to power their generators due to the grand epileptic power supply in my country.
Considering the solutions to these causes of pollution, I believe the first thing is to push for more sensitization of individuals starting from the grassroots. This is because it is still from the grassroots that those people in high places emerge. So when the foundation is well laid, ..you know the rest 😁.
Then, to combat the pollution from vehicles and industries is to adopt the recent technology of renewables including Electric Vehicles (EV), solar systems, and wind energy. To charge the EVs, large solar and wind energy farms will be of great importance to that cause.
Back to the individuals, the provision of a better power supply will bring down the rate at which fossil fuels are burnt to power up their home and businesses. Waste disposal systems that are efficacious and enforcement of strict rules against indiscriminate waste disposition.
These are basically the starting points to reduce pollution drastically in our local environement. Then, once these are done well, we can work our way up the ladder!