There are many reasons why plastic containers largely replaced glass in the 1970s. The petroleum crisis made the price of transport an issue and glass is expensive. It can’t be squeezed, and it breaks when kids drop it. There seemed nothing wrong with plastics in the mid-20th century. Even being made of oil, they actually saved more oil. This is no longer necessarily the case.

Of course, this doesn’t take into account the impact that plastics pollution would have when it escaped the normal routes of underground disposal. And in facilities where plastic was incinerated without exhaust control for many years, a massive amount of toxic substances was released into the global atmosphere contributing to both air and soil pollution. The breakdown products are sometimes toxic themselves, but how they’ll interact with each other largely remains unknown.

Even some of the plastics that are commonly used are now known to cause problems, such as plastic baby bottles and cups. These are now being phased out in favour of washable glass.

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People have been using trucks to move goods around North America since there have been trucks. However, the use of trucks to haul goods and food across long distances of the continent is a relatively recent phenomena.

The rise of tricking was largely fueled by the implementation of the he Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways were constructed with both the intent of increasing interstate commerce and built with overpasses high enough to allow military vehicles to pass. Virtually all products of interstate commerce travel on interstate highways at some point in their journey.

Trains are actually more efficient and have enjoyed a resurgence since the mid-1990s due to double trailer loads that can be directly hooked up to a semi-tractor. These roads also deliver international goods that have additional air miles attached. Nearly all sectors of the economy have continually sourced their raw materials and services from further and further away since the gas crisis of the 1970s.

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The technology that brought nighttime illumination to the whole world, didn’t change much for about a century. And, it turns out, that’s a problematic thing. Not only do the filaments burn out quickly, leaving glass and metal that is not recyclable, but they emit far more heat than light, using a great deal of electricity. With the advent of a long lasting compact fluorescent bulb in the 1990s, it became easy for consumers to change out these bulbs and use anywhere from half to one tenth the amount of power for the same amount of light.

In the ‘aughts, governments all over the world have seized upon the light bulb as an inherently wasteful technology that needlessly uses vast amounts of electricity – electricity that is emits carbon dioxide and all the other air pollutants that increase dependence upon fossil fuels. Replacing these bulbs can go a long way in helping nations meet their environmental treaty obligations. They also last longer and produce far less dangerous waste.

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“Environmental pollution–it’s not my problem.” Is this something you’ve heard? Is this something you’ve said? Is this something you believe?

If it is, consider opening your eyes and ears, because evidence from the World Health Organization and the World Bank strongly indicates that environmental pollution is everybody’s problem. According to these organizations’ estimates, some 20% of premature death worldwide can be related to environmental factors.

Imagine five people you know, and then imagine one of them dead due to environmental pollution. That’s not an abstract fear: that’s everybody’s problem. Granted, the majority of the “death statistics” are gathered in extremely poor parts of the world, most prominently sub-Saharan Africa (where these one in five deaths are almost always children under the age of six.)

“But environmental factors, that could mean anything,” you may think. The WHO/World Bank evidence cites specific pollution issues that are linked to premature death. The biggest offenders are water and air pollution–unclean drinking water and unsafe clouds of toxic smoke wafting over communities–with lead-based contamination coming in a grimly close third.

The biggest offender when it comes to deaths caused by environmental pollution is respiratory infections, which cause some 4 million child deaths per year. The usual cause of these infections is indoor airborne pollution. Cook fires fill the air of a house with grease, smoke, and other irritants, which quickly sap infant health. Outdoor cook fires are no better and simply spread the problem around, compounding it with existing chemical fires from burning plastic and poisoned animals. A close second infection caused by the application of pesticides, which kills another 3.5 million adults. Malaria and poisoned drinking water round out the picture.

This isn’t what we tend to think of when we think of environmental pollution–the classic image is a smokestack belching green clouds, or glowing drums of nuclear waste floating in a lagoon. What the World Bank/WHO report talks about, however, isn’t about classic images: it’s about the reality of life for one of the most populous continents in the world. In a thousand small ways, environmental pollution poisons the air and the water and makes life on earth impossible.

Most of us don’t live in sub-Saharan Africa and many of us treat these pollution-related deaths as something abstract, distant from our own experience. Aristotle famously said that action at a distance is impossible; empathy at a distance may be equally so. But in the modern world, we’re not as distant from the world of extreme poverty as we think. Unfortunately, it seems–based on statistics like this–that the only distance that matters may be the gap between wealth and poverty–the gap between water that kills us and water that keeps us alive.

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Animal species go extinct every day. There are thousands of bird species parakeets and seabirds that vanish before scientists or birdwatchers ever get a chance to study them, beyond a flap of wings or a blur of colourful feathers passing through a window. Insect populations, with their high birth rate and ever-changing environmental, spawn whole subfamilies and variant species before vanishing forever. And some of the world’s most beautiful and once-abundant mammals find their numbers dwindling into the hundreds, then the dozens, then to none at all.

There are any number of causes and any number of “villains” to blame. Environmental pollution and degradation is a common culprit. Overhunting is another. Simple Darwinism is yet another. Whatever the cause, however, the result is the same. A population of animals vanishes forever with no possibility of being encountered again.

That is–in most cases.

The story of the Tasmanian Tiger is all too typical in the world of endangered species studies and other issues related to environmental pollution and degradation. Yet the Tasmanian Tiger’s story is filled with unconventional flourishes. For example, the Tasmanian Tiger isn’t a true tiger at all, but a type of hybrid wolf/marsupial, named for the striped pattern on its hindquarters. At one time there were thousands of Tasmanian Tigers wandering the outback of Australia, competing with other animals for food, water, and breeding opportunities. Some 2,000 years ago, the Tasmanian Tiger lost this competition, and the only remaining members of the species were confined to Tasmania proper.

In the 1930s, the Tasmanian Tiger lost the competition for food and livelihood yet again–this time to the most dangerous opponent of all. Overhunting and the environmental pollution and degradation that comes hand in hand with human inhabitants moving into a formerly wild region led to the extinction of the Tasmanian Tiger for good. The last confirmed member of the species died in captivity in 1936. This was a double blow to zoology, since the Tasmanian Tiger wasn’t simply a species unto itself, but also the last surviving member of the mysterious genus Thylacinus, the marsupial wolves. The opportunity to study the convergent evolution of the genus was forever lost with the Tiger, a victim of environmental pollution and degradation.

But, as we said, the story of the Tasmanian Tiger is not without its unique flourishes–such as the flash of stripes seen moving through the field of vision of a park ranger in 1995, or the herd of six or seven Thylacines spotted raiding a villager’s livestock in 1997.

Could the verdict on this victim of environmental pollution and degradation have been premature? The Australian government has since 1995 been running an investigation into the wilds of Tasmania, seeking answers. The story of environmental pollution and degradation has been, throughout human history, a tragic one–the mysterious “resurrection” of the Tasmanian Tiger could be–in at least one story–a happy ending.

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You’ve no doubt heard a great deal about environmental pollution–but what do you really know about its causes, its effects, and what you can do about both of them? In this series of five essay questions, we’ll find out. So get your pencils and paper ready, and let’s get started, right now, with changing the world.

Environmental Pollution Cause And Effect Essay Question #1

What are you doing in your life, right now, to cause environmental pollution in your neighborhood?

Don’t just dash off an answer to this–think carefully. How do you dispose of your garbage? Do you sort your recycling? How do you get to work, to school, or into town to socialize with friends? Do you take a bus? Do you drive a car? And what products do you use to clean your house? To store your groceries? What groceries do you buy?

How much of an impact–positive or negative–do you make on the world?

Environmental Pollution Cause And Effect Essay Question #2

Given your answer to #1–how can you reduce any negative impact you make on the world? If you throw away your garbage indiscriminately, could you implement a recycling policy instead? If you drive everywhere you go within your city, could you carpool or take public transportation–or just walk or ride a bike? Could you get exercise and help to save the planet, both? Could you join a local activist group? Could you stop buying products from companies that pollute and choose green alternative products instead?

Environmental Pollution Cause And Effect Essay Question #3

What groups exist in your area to help stop environmental pollution? Is there a Greenpeace chapter, for example, or a PETA chapter? Are there protest groups or community action initiatives? Is there a community recycling program that you could get involved in? If these programs don’t exist, what would it take to start one? Who could you get to be involved?

Environmental Pollution Cause And Effect Essay Question #4

What projects might your environmental action group get involved in? Who are the major industrial leaders in your community? Who would you need to talk to in order to get information to them or ask them for information? Is there an easy way for you to talk to a community leader of some type, someone who has some policy-making authority over your community’s air and water standards? What could you say to him that would make a difference in your community? What could your group offer to him to help implement your environmental solutions?

Environmental Pollution Cause And Effect Essay Question #5

Based on these four questions: is there hope for the planet? Why or why not?

And if not–are you sure? Couldn’t you change that answer if you wanted to?

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We all know about environmental pollution: pollution and its costs, pollution and its causes, and pollution and its terrible effects. We know that environmental pollution (pollution of the air, in particular) causes the death of one in five people around the world every year, according to data gathered by the World Health Organization in partnership with the World Bank. And we know that environmental pollution has slowly made our world less populated with animal species, less safe for ourselves and our children, and less enjoyable for everyone in almost every way. How could this situation get any worse?

The answer: by recognizing a new kind of environmental pollution: pollution of the mind.

Pollution of the mind isn’t just what happens when you watch too much TV or read too many comic books at a vulnerable age. Rather, pollution of the mind is a concept discovered by researchers working with the effects of advertising on the public consciousness. The idea is that by placing offensive billboards in unavoidably conspicuous locations within a city or by filling the air with exhortations to buy new products, advertisers are effectively polluting the “mental space” of people in large urban areas.

Environmental pollution–pollution of whatever form–essentially means any damaging product, industrial or otherwise, that makes the world less safe and less pleasant to be in. We can argue that both of these qualities are present in pollution of the mind. Advertising is certainly an industrial product, for the most part, and it certainly makes the world less pleasant–unless you’re the type who finds it pleasant to be manipulated by major corporations into spending money you don’t have on products you don’t even enjoy, of course. And advertising can also make the world demonstrably less safe by stunting people’s critical thinking and diminishing the capacity for understanding and for empathy. Manipulating the population into buying products and manipulating the population into, say, starting, supporting, and fighting an endless land war are not as different, in the end, as one might assume.

Because of the problems inherent in this new form of environmental pollution–pollution of the mind–several grass-roots groups are starting to advocate taxing the use of the public’s “mental space”, much as corporations are taxed (at least in theory) for misusing the public’s air and water. This may be a double-edged sword, however, as some critics–notably Joseph Hale, a commentator from the environmental battlegrounds of Texas–have pointed out. To advocate the taxation of “mental space” is to invite the government into our very minds–the one place that, historically, the government has been kept out of.

Whatever the solution, however, it’s clear that for this newest form of environmental pollution–pollution of the mind–some solution is necessary. Once we can think clearly, we can begin working diligently on finding a solution to everything else.

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If you’ve heard of Vunisinu, a tiny fishing village in Fiji, you’ve probably heard of it in passing. For most, the village is nothing more than a dot in the south eastern coastal mangrove swamps while flying in to SUV-Nausori International Airport. But for anyone interested in global environmental problems–pollution in all its forms being chief among these–Vunisinu is nothing less than a ray of light in a darkening, smog-encrusted world.

Like life on earth, it all began with the fish. Vunisinu’s thirty-six families entirely depend on fishing to ensure their survival. We’re not talking about a simple catch of three or four dinner-quality salmon every day: we’re talking about a steady diet of prawns, mud crabs, and other delicacies that could cost $50 in a New York restaurant for a single diner, yet all of it plucked out of the ocean for free by the villages of Vunisinu. Vunisinu is located next to a massive coral reef, one of the classic sources of life on earth–and a subject familiar to any steady student of global environmental problems, pollution, and other grim topics. The coral reefs are slowly dying, victims of global environmental problems, pollution, and other causes–as the villages of Vunisinu learned.

When the fish yields began to decline–so much so that villagers began to import canned seafood from larger towns nearby–the families of Vunisinu initially blamed poachers. Poachers in the mangrove swamps of Fiji are fairly aggressive, actually going so far as to blow up parts of the reef with dynamite and to directly poison the water so as to kill large numbers of fish and massive swaths of coral at a single blow. This alone might count for global environmental problems/pollution in some interpretations.

But the real global environmental problems and pollution were from another source: the villagers themselves. Modern plumbing in Vunisinu sent “gray water” (wastewater) directly into the swamps and the coral. Trash and runoff from local pig farms was also routinely thrown away in the swamps and the sea with no thought of the consequences. After all, Vunisinu is a rural community, far away from the obvious effects of pollution in urban environments. Who knew that throwing one’s trash in the ocean could cause such global environmental problems and pollution? Who knew that a coral reef would be so easy to kill?

Today, Vunisinu has cleaned up its act. Compost toilets maintained by the “Enviroclean” company prevent the flushing of wastewater into the ocean, and trash is now collected and composted rather than simply discarded in the swamp. For nearly ten years now Vunisinu has worked to maintain its coral and its environmental purity. And the results–thousands of mud crabs, swimming in the fishing nets–are not only wonderful to think about, but delicious on a family dinner plate.

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If we knew how to stop environmental pollution, we’d be a happier culture today. But it’s harder to know how to stop environmental pollution than it might seem. The environment–as environmentalists continue to assure is–is something that affects all of us, yet that all of us affect. We may stop using CFC products, yes, and we may recycle individually, and we may do any number of positive things to make a difference in our world. But will giant chemical companies like DuPont and ConAgra do the same?

As hopeless as the project seems, there’s still no excuse for giving up all hope. There are ways to stop environmental pollution on a small scale by working with larger companies on discovering how to stop environmental pollution as well.

Take the movie “The Corporation”, a documentary created to explain the modern corporation in terms of a psychological model of personality. In an early sequence, protestors arrive on the doorstep of the CEO of Shell, one of the world’s largest oil companies. It seems like the sequence will end in the kind of textbook futility environmental activists have become used to over the years: the CEO shouts at everyone, claims they’re crazy, throws them out or has them removed. Instead, the CEO and his wife invite the protestors to lunch.

Over the course of the lunch, they talk about the issues facing the earth, including the pressing question of how to stop environmental pollution. And they find something surprising. Despite the disparity in the two groups’ status–the protesters being young and as a rule struggling, the CEO being, well, a CEO–they find that they have the same concerns. They’re both extremely worried about the fate of the earth. They both believe that something needs to be done about environmental pollution.

Yet neither of them knows how to stop environmental pollution–despite the fact that the former group is dedicated to stopping it, and the fact that the CEO is at the head of a company that could be said to be causing it.

The movie goes on to explore the paradox. But what the movie takes as a starting point, we can take as our goal. The correct route to stopping environmental pollution isn’t to work unilaterally as either a protestor or a corporation to effect change. How to stop environmental pollution for good? Attempt to coordinate efforts with the people who do have the power–the CEOs of the chemical companies–to find small ways to make a difference. You might set up a charity operation for environmental cleanup efforts into which some money could be funneled, or put together facts and figures about sustainable industry and make a proposal to work with your CEO neighbors on means to implement sustainable projects.

There’s no reason to go it alone. The environment affects us all, and the question of how to stop environmental pollution affects us all as well. Let’s hope that we can all realize it in enough time.

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Industrial pollution & environmental degradation are widely–and rightly–considered one of the largest problems facing our late-capitalist society. The continued effects of industrial pollution & environmental degradation make our factories less efficient (believe it or not), poison our groundwater, poison our air, use up natural resources and generally make the world filthier, deadlier, and less pleasant to be a part of.

And nowhere is this more evident than in the mysterious “Sea of Trash”, one of the saddest legacies of industrial pollution & environmental degradation currently on display anywhere in the world.

The Sea of Trash is exactly what it sounds like. Plastic refuse and improperly-disposed-of trash is often dumped offshore, even in comparatively environmentally-conscious states like California and Oregon. In the minds of the illegal dumpers, this plastic refuse just drifts away somewhere out of sight and therefore out of mind, eventually probably becoming waterlogged and sinking into the Pacific, someone else’s problem. In reality, plastic trash almost never degrades naturally, nor does it simply sink into the water, out of sight. It continues to float on the surface of the ocean until it’s picked up on the neck of an animal–contributing to extinction and the pollution of animal habitats–or until it reaches its final goal, the dark legacy of industrial pollution & environmental degradation: the Sea of Trash.

Refuse tends to come to the Sea of Trash because of its position in the North Pacific Gyre. The Coriolis Effect causes ocean currents to swirl, forming massive vortexes in the sea. These vortexes slowly draw water into them from all bordering regions. The water will slowly leave the area through evaporation and the standard weather cycle. Anything carried along in that water, however, will remain trapped in the vortex forever: the prisoner of industrial pollution & environmental degradation.

The Sea of Trash is the largest complex of trapped industrial refuse in the world, with an estimated surface area anywhere from 700 thousand to one million square kilometers, nothing but floating plastic refuse virtually the size of Texas. It didn’t get that way overnight, of course. According to official estimates, trash takes roughly a year to reach the Sea of Trash from the east coast of Asia and five years to reach the Sea from the west coast of the United States. Reach the Sea it does, however, leaving the world just a little bit more ravaged by industrial pollution & environmental degradation than it was before.

So what can be done about the Sea of Trash? The only thing we can do, it seems, is to try not to make the Sea any larger than it already is. Beyond that, all we can do is float amidst the plastic bottles and milk jugs–and hope that we haven’t already pushed the planet too far.

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