Modern consumer man actually consumes very little. He merely uses things. Though he burns, buries, grinds, or flushes his wastes, the material survives in some form. And technology adds to the life of products. At one time tin-cans used to rust away; now we have the immortal aluminium can, which may outlast the Pyramids.
Human pollution is infinitely multiplied in big cities. New York City, for example, dumps 200 million gallons of raw sewage into the Hudson River daily. Each square mile of Manhattan produces 375,000 pounds of waste a day. When the waste is burnt, thirty percent of the residue drifts in the air as ash until it settles on the citizens.
The sheer size of big cities slows down the cleansing winds; at the same time, rising city heat helps to create thermal inversion (a layer of warmer air above cooler) that can trap pollutants for days in the air – a crisis that in 1963 killed 400 New Yorkers. Cars complete the deadly picture. While chimneys belch sulphur dioxide, motor vehicles add tons of carbon monoxide (which forms nearly 60 percent of smog) and other deadly gases. Car-exhaust fumes, containing tetraethyl lead, affect human nerves, increase irritability and decrease normal brain function. In the automobile’s 70 – year history, the lead content of the environment has risen alarmingly. Arctic glaciers now contain wind- blown lead.
The hope is that car manufacturers will soon design exhaust-free electric or steam motors. Another hope is that nuclear power will be used to produce electricity in place of smoggy ‘fossil fuels' ( oil, coal ). But nuclear plants give out pollution, too: not only radioactive waste, which must be buried, but also extremely hot water that has to go somewhere and can become a serious threat to marine life.
Industry already devours
water on a vast scale- it takes 600,000 gallons to make one ton of synthetic
rubber, for example – and the hot water produced releases dissolved oxygen in
rivers and lakes, killing the bacteria that break up sewage. Meanwhile, the ever
– mounting sewage is causing other oxygen-robbing processes, and dangerously
depleting the oxygen in river basins.
What cities badly need is an organized approach to tackling pollution: a computer analysis of everything that a total environment is taking in and giving out, through air, land, water. Only then can cities make reasonable choices and balance the system. Equally vital are economic incentives, such as taxing specific pollutants so that factories stop using them. Since local governments may be slow to make effluent charges, fearing loss of industry, the obvious need is to have regional co- operation in enforcing the scientific use of water.
By - Brendan J. Carroll
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