What is a Pollutant? Where do they come from? You’d be surprised.
We spend a lot of time here discussing water and water purity – or, more honestly, water impurity. But on a more basic level it’s important to understand what water pollution is. Because it’s not just a matter of saying “It’s iron in your water,” or “lead in your water.” Water pollution is a general term we use to describe a long list of items and elements that reach the water system in undesirable levels.
A pollutant is, essentially, any element that makes a clean system impure. So lead is a pollutant when it’s in your water; so is iron. But countless other substances and materials are pollutants in our water. Waste produced by human action, industrial manufacturing, agriculture, mining, and transportation, to name a few possibilities, can all result in pollution, in particular water pollution.
There are many elements, in other words, that wind up in our water that we don’t want there. Medical waste shows up in our water supply in unexpected ways. Just as we are concerned with antibiotics in our milk – and as many of us choose to spend extra money to get organic, hormone-and-antibiotic free cow’s milk – we should be concerned with antibiotics appearing in our water supply. And as we may spend extra pennies for the better milk, we should spend a few pennies to assure ourselves of clean water.
It’s not that most companies are deliberately going around polluting our water supply. But the fact is that industrial runoff happens. Even worse, medicines and treatments we take ourselves wind up back in the water system; recent news articles indicate that while in some cases this might not be a serious problem, in other situations, it really is significant. It’s important for us to think of water as something that is always, always vulnerable. It is so easy for us to take our water supply and its purity for granted. But we really shouldn’t do that.
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