Waste and Pollution

All human activities- domestic, agricultural, manufacturing, or commercial, have a few broad features in common. They draw on material and energy resources, produce an object or service of value and reject the balance material and energy- in a degraded form. Often, the degraded material and energy, such as scrap, dirty water and low temperature gasses are not usable any more. They must be thrown away. And more mechanised/automated the activity, more is the energy/material wasted.

Thus, all human activities produce waste. The waste is thrown into air, into water bodies or onto land; in short, into our environment, upsetting its material and energy balance and diminishing the overall usefulness of natural resources. Orderliness or structure of the environment gets degraded and disorderliness or entropy increases. This state of the environment is called pollution. One may, therefore, say that every human activity causes pollution.

Fortunately, the environment is dynamic, not static. In-built processes within the environment system keep restoring its balance. But for that to happen one has to wait with patience, for days in some cases and for hundreds of years in the other difficult cases (such as plastic waste, detergents and ozone depleting substances). These self-correcting (or self-cleaning, as some would say) processes are working at a gigantic and global scale, though at somewhat slow pace.
Some of the natural processes which help clean the environment are:

· Atmospheric air getting dissolved in small quantities in sea, river, lake and rain drops,
· Green leaves absorbing Carbon dioxide gas and emitting Oxygen gas through photosynthesis,
· Breaking down of complex organic molecules into simpler molecules by certain bacteria,
· Oxidation of organic compounds into carbon dioxide and water with or without the help of bacteria,
· Absorption of chemicals and toxins by plant life, and
· Processes of the water cycle which carry large quantities of impurities into the sea- the sea acting as a huge sink.

There surely are other such processes, which are not mentioned here, or are not yet known to/ understood by our scientists. But we know that the self-cleaning capacity of the environment, in terms of tons of pollutants cleaned per year, is limited. We also know that the rate of waste generation in large parts of the world, specially the developed (and many developing) countries, has already exceeded the limiting values. Add to this the fact the human beings have unlimited greed for more goods and services.

Hence, production of waste and environmental degradation will go on unchecked, unless we change our behaviour and use natural resources with care and consideration. This change also needs to be reflected in political will and action of governments.