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By Martha Barksdale
Pollution, the introduction of manmade contaminants into the natural environment, can be as simple as your neighbor's too-bright porch light shining into your bedroom window and interfering with your sleep. It can also occur on a massive scale, such as the introduction of fluorocarbons into the atmosphere, destroying the Earth's ozone layer and causing a global-warming effect. Uncontrolled pollution can result in the destruction of Earth's natural environment.
Pollution isn't just a modern problem. In the 12th century, King Edward I banned the selling of sea coal because the smoke from the soft coal combined with London's infamous fog to produce the first recorded incidences of "smog" [source: Urbinato]. The English didn't obey the rules, however, since few could afford the more expensive wood to fuel their fires. Three hundred years later, Shakespeare's witches in "Macbeth" chanted about the "fog and ****** air."
Pollution has been around for centuries, and researchers are continually looking for new, more efficient ways of trying to cope with it. Here, we'll learn about five types of pollution and the new technologies researchers are developing to combat them. Some require a fair amount of expertise and creativity, such as the "super trees" of Lima, Peru, while others are just basic common-sense approaches.
5. Water Pollution
Nearly one out of every three people in the world lacks a reliable source of clean drinking water [source: World Health Organization]. Water may be scarce due to a lack of rain or the means to transport it from the river or well to the settlement, or the water may be polluted. Drinking contaminated water can cause a variety of diseases, including cholera and dysentery.
Nanotechnology, which deals with matter on an atomic level, seems to hold promise in water purification. A company in South Africa, Marelize Botes, has developed a water filter that resembles a teabag. Instead of tea, however, active carbon granules fill the bag. The bag itself is made from nanofibers treated with biocide to kill bacteria [source: Poppendieck and Sinico]. LifeStraw, a portable water filter manufactured by the Swiss company Vestergaard Frandsen, is an inexpensive purification method that thousands of people have adopted since its invention in 2005. LifeStraw costs around $3 per unit, and anyone old enough to use a straw -- usually about age 3 -- can use it [source: Vestergaard Frandsen].
Soaking Up the Oil
The BP incident in the Gulf of Mexico during the spring and summer of 2010 gave everyone a lesson in the difficulty of cleaning up an oil spill. Many groups tried different technologies with varying degrees of success. Most relied on an agent that acts as a sponge, soaking up the oil. One new technology in this area is aerogel, an extremely light solid known as "frozen smoke," that soaks up the oil [source: American Chemical Society]. Another is a vacuum cleaner that blows bark into the oil to absorb it, then sucks it back up again [source: The Norwegian University of Science and Technology].
(to be continued)
Pollution, the introduction of manmade contaminants into the natural environment, can be as simple as your neighbor's too-bright porch light shining into your bedroom window and interfering with your sleep. It can also occur on a massive scale, such as the introduction of fluorocarbons into the atmosphere, destroying the Earth's ozone layer and causing a global-warming effect. Uncontrolled pollution can result in the destruction of Earth's natural environment.
Pollution isn't just a modern problem. In the 12th century, King Edward I banned the selling of sea coal because the smoke from the soft coal combined with London's infamous fog to produce the first recorded incidences of "smog" [source: Urbinato]. The English didn't obey the rules, however, since few could afford the more expensive wood to fuel their fires. Three hundred years later, Shakespeare's witches in "Macbeth" chanted about the "fog and ****** air."
Pollution has been around for centuries, and researchers are continually looking for new, more efficient ways of trying to cope with it. Here, we'll learn about five types of pollution and the new technologies researchers are developing to combat them. Some require a fair amount of expertise and creativity, such as the "super trees" of Lima, Peru, while others are just basic common-sense approaches.
5. Water Pollution
Nearly one out of every three people in the world lacks a reliable source of clean drinking water [source: World Health Organization]. Water may be scarce due to a lack of rain or the means to transport it from the river or well to the settlement, or the water may be polluted. Drinking contaminated water can cause a variety of diseases, including cholera and dysentery.
Nanotechnology, which deals with matter on an atomic level, seems to hold promise in water purification. A company in South Africa, Marelize Botes, has developed a water filter that resembles a teabag. Instead of tea, however, active carbon granules fill the bag. The bag itself is made from nanofibers treated with biocide to kill bacteria [source: Poppendieck and Sinico]. LifeStraw, a portable water filter manufactured by the Swiss company Vestergaard Frandsen, is an inexpensive purification method that thousands of people have adopted since its invention in 2005. LifeStraw costs around $3 per unit, and anyone old enough to use a straw -- usually about age 3 -- can use it [source: Vestergaard Frandsen].
Soaking Up the Oil
The BP incident in the Gulf of Mexico during the spring and summer of 2010 gave everyone a lesson in the difficulty of cleaning up an oil spill. Many groups tried different technologies with varying degrees of success. Most relied on an agent that acts as a sponge, soaking up the oil. One new technology in this area is aerogel, an extremely light solid known as "frozen smoke," that soaks up the oil [source: American Chemical Society]. Another is a vacuum cleaner that blows bark into the oil to absorb it, then sucks it back up again [source: The Norwegian University of Science and Technology].
(to be continued)
