Sources of Industrial Pollutants
As a byproduct of the Industrial Age and factories today, industrial pollutants have been considered a necessary evil for the modernization we enjoy and which produces our modern day conveniences. Yet if one is asked what industrial pollutants are, the best image many can come up with are the smokestacks of yesteryear. Today's industrial pollutants are far less obvious in the skyline but just as deadly if not more so.
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Where do Industrial Pollutants Come From?
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Industrial pollutants are pollution and waste by-product directly connected with industrial manufacturing. Industrial pollutants represent the leading worldwide cause of pollution in general and probably the most toxic to all life and nature. Because industrial pollutants are produced in such large capacity from manufacturing worldwide and because they last so long before breaking down, this kind of pollution is a toxicity risk for the entire planet.
History
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The Industrial Revolution in Europe and the U.S. was probably the first, main catalyst for the production of industrial pollutants. Starting in the 1800s, manufacturing took on a mechanized approach with assembly lines, large consumption of raw materials and chemical by-product production. The most notorious industrial pollutant at that time was the carbon exhaust from coal-burning which provided the power for many factories.
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Today's Pollutant Sources
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Modern industrial pollutants don't use smokestacks nearly as often as in the past, but there is a far greater presence of liquid chemical pollutant produced. With the refining of manufacturing came new ways of melting, cleaning, acidifying and steaming products. That created another rainbow of pollutant by-product. Water pollution is now one of the biggest industrial pollutants, with wastewater pumped daily from factories that use it for washing and cooling among other uses.
Air Pollutants Still Exist
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There is still a significant amount of industrial pollutants produced from burning. Many industries that use combustion for product-creation regularly burn off various toxic gases that get released into the atmosphere that we breathe. Oil refining factories and complexes remain the most visible example of this process.
Storage Pollutants
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Many industries today are not allowed to release industrial pollutants willy-nilly. They either ship them off to destruction vendors or recycle them. This situation creates a lot of storage of by-product waiting for final treatment. Many times leaks or accidental breaks in storage barriers can cause these pollutants to spread into the immediate area with significant damage and poisoning of the environment. Chemicals released in landfills or slurry coal ash pits that break loose are common examples of industrial pollutants causing widespread damage to neighborhoods.
Industrial Pollutants Don't Follow Borders
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Frequently, industrial pollutants in gas form can spread over wide geographic areas. Once combined with the atmosphere, the gas pollutant is captured in condensation that comes back to earth. Acid rain in forests of other countries or pollution contamination found in Arctic ice both represent examples where industrial pollutants have traveled far from their original production location in a different country.
As long as modern manufacturing requires large scale by-product creation, mankind will have to deal with and address the problem of industrial pollutants. Given the large amount of increase occurring in developing countries today, the issue is very much a global relationship problem now rather than a particular regional issue.
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References
- Photo Credit Image by Flickr.com, courtesy of Diego Cupolo
