Question: can we help stop pollution?

Emma Markham answered on 17 Jun 2019:

I don’t think we can stop all pollution, because there are a lot of sources of pollution and some are worse than others. There are also lots of types of pollution, including water pollution (eg. where fertilizers wash off farmland into rivers causing algal blooms which kills fish and wildlife), plastic pollution (plastic in the ocean and earth, which takes thousands of years to breakdown and can hard wildlife), noise pollution (where the sound of boat motors or underwater explosions can impact animals like whales which uses sound to communication and navigate, or when the sound of a motorway or airport runway can makes people unhappy), light pollution (street lighting left on all night which confuses wildlife and means you cannot observe the stars) and air pollution (where factories, cars and animals release gases which damage the atmosphere and harm peoples breathing, in some cases cancer and reducing life expectancy).

Each of those types of pollution would need specific changes, for example light pollution, you can program streetlights to turn off after midnight and only turn on if they detect a car. Unfortunately, there is no easy solution to address all types of pollution. One of the biggest types of pollution is air pollution, but this has many causes, like farming cattle for meat, because they produce a lot of methane which contributes to climate change, to tackle this everyone would need to become vegan which is impractical.

If we want to tackle pollution it will take a lot of changes, but lots of people care about protecting the planet, so hopefully we can support scientist in developing solutions to these problems.