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Pollutant

Substance or energy damaging to the environment

  • 4 min read
  • 4 chapters
  • 2 labs on Lably

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Lab · Class 10–12Pollution of Air & WaterLabSynthetic Fibres & Plastics

A pollutant may cause long- or short-term damage by changing the growth rate of plant or animal species, or by interfering with resources used by humans, human health or wellbeing, or property values. Some pollutants are biodegradable and therefore will not persist in the environment in a long term. However, the degradation products of some pollutants are themselves pollutants such as DDE and DDD produced from the degradation of DDT.

Pollution has widespread negative impact on the environment. When analyzed from a planetary boundaries perspective, human society has released novel entities that well exceed safe levels.

Different types of pollutants in the environment

Pollutants can be categorized in a variety of different ways. For example, it is sometimes useful to distinguish between stock pollutants and fund pollutants. Another way is to group them together according to more specific properties, such as organic, particulate, pharmaceutical, et cetera. The environment has some capacity to absorb many discharges without measurable harm, and this is called “assimilative capacity (or absorptive capacity); a pollutant actually causes pollution when the assimilative capacity is exceeded.

Stock pollutants

Pollutants, towards which the environment has low absorptive capacity are called stock pollutants. Examples include persistent organic pollutants like PCBs, non-biodegradable plastics and heavy metals. Stock pollutants accumulate in the environment over time. The damage they cause increases as more pollutant is emitted, and persists as the pollutant accumulates. Stock pollutants can create a burden for the future generations, bypassing on the damage that persists well after the benefits received from incurring that damage, have been forgotten. Scientists have officially deemed that the planetary boundaries safe chemical pollutant levels (novel entities) have been surpassed.

Fund pollutants

In contrast to stock pollutants, for which the environment has low absorptive capacity, fund pollutants are those for which the environment has a moderate absorptive capacity. Fund pollutants do not cause damage to the environment unless the emission rate exceeds the receiving environment's absorptive capacity (e.g. carbon dioxide, which is absorbed by plants and oceans). Fund pollutants are not destroyed, but rather converted into less harmful substances, or diluted/dispersed to non-harmful concentrations.

Specific groups of pollutants

Many pollutants are within the following notable groups:

Light pollutant

Light pollution is the impact that anthropogenic light has on the visibility of the night sky. It also encompasses ecological light pollution which describes the effect of artificial light on individual organisms and on the structure of ecosystems as a whole.

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