Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Interesting facts about pollution on our planet

Americans use approximately 2.2 billion pounds of pesticides every year. Many of these pesticides are very harmful to environment. For instance more than 100 active pesticide ingredients are suspected of causing cancer, birth defects, and various other health problems.

46% of American lakes are too polluted for fishing, swimming, or aquatic life.

More than one third of China's Yellow River is not only safe for drinking but is also unsafe for industrial use (water pollution worse than level 5).

The main sources of pollution are definitely industry and vehicles. Country that is currently world's biggest polluter is China followed by United States.

China's annual CO2 Emissions were in 2007 6.01 billion tonnes of CO2 compared to US 5.90 billion tonnes. It has to also said that China has lot more people than US.

About 80 % of urban waste in India ends up in rivers which is the main reason behind India's water pollution problem.

Asian rivers are rivers most polluted in the world. They have three times as many bacteria from human waste as the global average. Of course these rivers are also responsible for many waterborne diseases. Some reports say that each year there are about 250 million cases of water-related diseases, with approximately 5 to 10 million deaths.

Approximately about 80% of the pollution in seas and oceans comes from land-based activities.

Less than 1% of the world's oceans, and only about 4% of coastal waters are protected which attributes to global ocean and sea pollution.

As long as world sticks with fossil fuels as dominant energy sources pollution is very likely to grow even further. Clean renewable energy would make excellent ally in fight against pollution.

3 comments:

  1. this website helped me tremendously with not only my homework but my understanding with ocean and sea pollution. thank you very much.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This website helped me in my biology presentation.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This helped me do my homework and want to help the world!

    ReplyDelete