Pollution

What is pollution?

Pollution is the introduction of harmful materials into the environment. These harmful materials are called pollutants. Pollutants can be natural, such as volcanic ash. They can also be created by human activity, such as litter/trash or runoff produced by factories.

What are the 4 types of pollution?

The major kinds of pollution, usually classified by environment, are:

• air pollution
• water pollution
• land pollution

Modern society is also concerned about specific types of pollutants, such as noise pollution, radiation, light pollution, and plastic pollution.

What is a pollutant?

A pollutant is a substance or energy introduced into the environment that has undesired effects, or adversely affects the usefulness of a resource. These can be both naturally forming (i.e. minerals or extracted compounds like oil) or anthropogenic in origin (i.e. manufactured materials or by-products from biodegradation).

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