The Global Environmental Development Platform

 #Heat is an industrial water pollutant. Electric generating plants, nuclear power plants and many other manufacturing operations require enormous amount of water for cooling. Water needed for factory operations is drawn from lakes or rivers. Afterwards, the hot water is discharged back into the same lake or river, and if this water is hot enough to raise average temperatures in a large volume of the stream or lake, this can radically upset the ecosystem. Plants and animals adapted to a certain temperature are affected and may be unable to survive when the temperature rises a degree or two above the upper limit of that range. In most cases, as in gas flaring, temperatures are raised so high that fish and other aquatic mammals migrate to calmer and cooler waters. The result is a drastic reduction of population of these animals in that region, and subsequently the economics of that region is also brutally affected in terms of fishing and fish trading. For instance, the rivers in the rura

Industrial pollution is  a menace to the aquatic ecosystem. Most factories discharge three or four times more oxygen demanding wastes than sewers and they dump poisons into the water as well. Despite the shift from the industrial era to a more integrated approach as regards knowledge and the advancement of technology, this has and can be seen to remedy some of the impacts of industrial wastes. However, some sources may simply have been eliminated. The average wastes gotten from the modern sulphate, pulp and paper process is less than one tenth of what it was from the sulfite process formerly used in paper mills. So in other words, technology has contributed largely to industrial processes to this regard. Still, new and complex chemical processes are on a frequent basis developed and have increased the possibility of releasing dangerous chemical pollutants that are hard to detect and control.  Most industries are always over eager to introduce new chemicals and materials into their pro

When a town grows into a city, or when many towns and cities are built along the same river, the #ecosystem is overwhelmed by the large amount of #wastes. So #sewage treatment becomes absolutely necessary. Modern sewage technology shows an understanding and application of part of the #aquatic ecosystem. Sewage treatment plants for instance, utilize the same microorganisms that serve as decomposers in natural bodies of water. But as #urban growth and #population have continued to increase, it has become apparent that sewage treatment technology is only partly in tune with the ecosystem. However, the nitrates, phosphates and other nutrients released from the organic matter by the #microorganisms in the sewage treatment plants are passed on through the ecosystem where they stimulate the growth of #algae. Thus, the end result is #eutrophication. Algae overgrowth has been a major factor, for instance, in the break down of the ecosystem in some of North America’s lakes such as the #Lake Erie