Pollution — Types & Examples

What Is Pollution?

Pollution occurs when human-made products or human activities have a harmful effect on the environment.

What Are Pollutants?

Types of pollutants include light, noise, thermal, and radioactive substances. Sometimes we can see them as particulate matter, like in the case of smog or dust.

What Is Light Pollution?

This is what prevents you from easily seeing stars in the night sky when you live in a city. It can affect many animals. Baby turtles and birds use the light of the moon to direct themselves to the ocean. When lights from buildings are brighter than the moon, the baby animals can become confused and go in the wrong direction.

What Is Sound Pollution?

When you sit in a noisy restaurant and can't hear what your friends are saying because everyone else is too loud, you are experiencing sound pollution. Sounds caused by boat engines can confuse whales and keep them from communicating with one another.

What Is Thermal Pollution?

This often happens when factories release waste water into nearby rivers. The water might be purified and clean, but it might be warmer than the normal temperature of the river. Changing the temperature of the river can damage delicately balanced ecosystems by killing microorganisms or causing algae blooms.

What Is Radioactive Pollution?

This is caused, of course, by radioactivity. This can occur when power plants have safety failures, like in Chernobyl. Improper disposal of radioactive materials can also cause dangerous chemicals to get into the surrounding environment.

Overall Effects

Pollution can hurt water, soil, and air. High air pollution levels are a major contributor to global warming. Examples of air pollutants are carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, and sulfur dioxide. A lack of clean air can be problematic for not only humans, but also plants, animals, and bacteria in the ecosystem.

Industrial waste and plastic pollution like in the image above can cause dangerous conditions both on land and in the ocean. For example, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has over 80,000 tons of plastic and other waste, which is floating in the ocean.

Definition of Pollution

Environmental pollution is any substance that is in the wrong environment or in an incorrect concentration that has a negative impact on an environment.

Changing Abiotic Conditions

Harsh chemicals from factories or runoff from fields and cattle ranches can change soil, water, and air conditions. This negatively impacts the organisms that live in that environment. Pesticides and fertilizers from farms are some of the biggest culprits.

When pesticides, fertilizers, and other hazardous chemicals enter the water table, it can have far-reaching impacts like changing the acidity of lakes, rivers, and the ocean. Water pollution can change pH levels, causing immediate consequences for aquatic life. Plants can't grow in the new pH environments. All of the aquatic organisms that rely on the plants also suffer.

Pollutants can also have an effect on temperature, which is another abiotic factor. These changes in temperature can lead to effects such as climate change.

Poor air quality and lack of clean water hurt human health as well. Exposure to pollutants has been linked to respiratory disease, like lung cancer, and birth defects, making it a pressing public health issue.

(Video) Pollution

by CrashCourse

A pollutant is any substance that negatively affects an environment and all the organisms that live there. In this video, Hank from Crash Course discusses some of the effects they can have, from global long-term climate change to affecting individual communities of organisms.