94 Fun Facts About Pollution

Pollution coming from one concentrated site, like a factory, is called what?

Agricultural runoff and microplastics are the classic nonpoint sources.

About how many deaths worldwide did pollution cause in 2019?

About 9 million, roughly one death in six, and rising deaths from outdoor air and chemicals offset gains against dirty water and indoor smoke.

Which conditions cause the most deaths linked to outdoor air pollution?

Heart disease and stroke lead the toll, since the finest particles can pass from the lungs into the bloodstream.

Before the 1860s, what did the word 'pollution' usually refer to?

Desecration of something sacred fits the word's Latin root polluere, 'to soil or defile', long before it meant dirtying the environment.

PFAS compounds are informally known by what nickname?

Forever chemicals barely break down in nature, so PFAS now turn up in the blood of people and animals all over the world.

The smog of car-choked cities forms when exhaust gases react with what?

Sunlight drives the reactions that turn car exhaust gases into ozone, the main ingredient of this kind of smog.

Particulate matter labeled PM2.5 is measured in what unit?

Micrometres: particles 2.5 micrometres across or smaller are fine enough to pose the greatest health risk of all the particle sizes.

Which gas can kill people at concentrations below one part per thousand?

Hydrogen sulfide smells of rotten eggs at first, but it quickly deadens the sense of smell, so victims may not notice it until too late.

Which country has emitted the most carbon dioxide in total since the Industrial Revolution?

The United States leads all-time emissions with about a fifth to a quarter of the total, though another country now emits more each year.

Which country became the world's largest yearly emitter of carbon dioxide in the late 2000s?

China took the lead in yearly emissions while still ranking far behind wealthy countries in emissions per person.

The Vietnam War defoliant Agent Orange was contaminated with which compound?

Dioxin, a by-product of herbicide production, is why Agent Orange exposure has been linked to cancer and birth defects.

Which heavy metal is found in rechargeable batteries and is a frequent soil contaminant?

Cadmium in soil is taken up by crops, which is why most people's exposure comes from food or from cigarettes.

Which carmaker admitted in 2015 to fitting diesel cars with software that cheated emissions tests?

Volkswagen's software switched full emissions controls on only during tests, so on the road its cars emitted up to 40 times the US limit.

Over which continent does the ozone hole open wide each spring?

Antarctica's extreme winter cold forms polar stratospheric clouds, and when daylight returns in spring, chlorine released on them destroys ozone.

What did the huge 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo cause worldwide for the next year or two?

Lower global temperatures followed as its haze high in the stratosphere reflected solar energy back into space for more than a year.

What does the US Superfund program pay to clean up?

Toxic waste sites: the 1980 law taxed chemical and petroleum companies to fund cleanups when no responsible polluter could be found.

Which bird of prey nearly vanished from the lower 48 US states after DDT thinned its eggshells?

Bald eagle numbers rebounded after the US banned DDT, and in 2007 the bird came off the endangered species list.

As dissolved carbon dioxide lowers the ocean's pH, which marine life is especially at risk?

Corals and mollusks build shells and skeletons from calcium carbonate, whose raw materials grow scarcer as seawater's pH falls.

Which two pollutants are the main causes of acid rain?

Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, mostly from burning fossil fuels, react with water in the air to form sulfuric and nitric acids.

In environmental economics, pollution from manufacturing is an example of what?

A negative externality: because polluters don't pay the full cost of the fumes, the market produces too much of such goods.

Which annual event began on April 22, 1970, with US rallies and teach-ins against pollution?

Earth Day drew about 20 million Americans to rallies and teach-ins, and before the year was out the EPA had been established.

Which toxic metal was phased out of car fuel worldwide in 2021, when Algeria stopped selling it?

Lead in petrol had fouled air, soil and water for almost a century, harming children's developing brains.

Which English king banned the burning of mineral coal in London in 1306?

Edward I acted because burning sea-coal was fouling London's air.

What nickname did Londoners give the thick coal fogs that plagued London?

Pea-soupers had marked London since the 19th century, and the worst, in December 1952, disrupted travel for days.

Which tiny plastic particles did a 2015 US law ban from rinse-off cosmetics and toothpaste?

Microbeads scrubbed skin and teeth, but they slipped down drains and through water treatment into rivers, lakes and the sea.

Which Pennsylvania town suffered a deadly smog event in the late 1940s?

Donora's smog killed 20 people and helped push the US toward federal air pollution laws.

The Great Smog of 1952 prompted which landmark British law?

The Clean Air Act of 1956 made homes and factories in affected urban areas switch from raw coal to cleaner fuels.

What weather system trapped the Great Smog of 1952 over London?

An anticyclone caused an inversion that trapped cold air and chimney smoke under warmer air for five days; about 4,000 deaths were counted at first.

Who wrote Fumifugium, an early 1661 tract against London's air pollution?

John Evelyn, the diarist, addressed it to King Charles II and Parliament, proposing remedies for the city's foul air.

Which Michigan city switched to river water to save money in 2014, leaving its tap water contaminated?

Flint's river water proved so corrosive that General Motors stopped using it at its engine plant.

The Amoco Cadiz oil tanker wrecked in 1978 off which French region?

Brittany's coast was fouled after the tanker's steering failed in a storm and it ran onto the Portsall Rocks.

Which city beside the Chernobyl nuclear plant was abandoned after the 1986 disaster?

Pripyat was evacuated on 27 April, the day after the explosion, and its workers were later moved to a new city, Slavutych.

The world's best-known garbage patch sits in which ocean gyre?

Its low density of tiny particles means satellites and even passing boaters cannot see it.

Which organisation estimated in 2018 that the world's best-known garbage patch covers 1.6 million square kilometres?

The Ocean Cleanup surveyed the patch with a fleet of 30 vessels and an aircraft, putting its area at about twice the size of Texas.

Minamata disease, first found in Japan in 1956, is caused by poisoning from what?

Mercury discharged by a Chisso chemical plant contaminated the seafood local people ate.

Which 1962 book documented the harm of the pesticide DDT?

Silent Spring's author, Rachel Carson, died in 1964, but the book fuelled the campaigns that ended US use of DDT in 1972.

Which Cleveland river caught fire in 1969, drawing national attention to its pollution?

The Cuyahoga's fire began in oily waste under two railroad trestles, showing how badly industry had fouled the river.

Which 1987 treaty set out to phase out CFCs and other ozone-depleting chemicals?

The Montreal Protocol cut ozone-depleting chemicals so sharply that the ozone layer is now slowly recovering.

For how much did Hooker Chemical sell its buried Love Canal dump site in 1953?

$1: homes and a school were later built on the site, where buried chemicals seeped into backyards and basements.

What did the Exxon Valdez strike in Prince William Sound in 1989?

Bligh Reef ripped open the tanker's hull, spilling nearly 11 million gallons of crude oil.

Which oil spill is the largest ever to affect US waters?

Deepwater Horizon's blowout killed 11 workers, and oil poured into the Gulf for about three months before the well was capped.

Microplastics are defined as plastic particles smaller than what size?

5 mm is about the size of a pencil eraser, and such bits come from larger debris breaking apart as well as pellets made for manufacturing.

Which toxic gas leaked in the 1984 Bhopal disaster?

Methyl isocyanate from a Union Carbide pesticide plant drifted over crowded neighbourhoods, exposing more than 500,000 people.

A 2023 Global Framework on Chemicals with 28 targets was agreed in which German city?

In Bonn, governments agreed to end the use of hazardous farm pesticides where their risks have not been managed, by 2035.

Which flowers were used after Chernobyl to draw radioactive caesium and strontium out of a pond?

Sunflowers soak up radioactive metals through their roots, a method called rhizofiltration. In one study, their roots cut uranium levels in water by nearly 95% in 24 hours.

Which marble monument, ringed by a strict emissions zone, has pollution turned yellow-brown?

The Taj Mahal sits inside a 10,400-square-kilometre zone set up after India's Supreme Court stepped in during the 1990s. Restorers now apply mud packs to bring back the white of the marble.

Which songbirds did coal miners carry underground as an early warning of carbon monoxide?

Canaries show the effects of carbon monoxide sooner than people do, which gave miners time to get out. Physiologist John Scott Haldane proposed using small animals this way in the 1890s.

Which Dr. Seuss book features the Once-ler, whose factory fells a whole Truffula forest to make Thneeds?

The Lorax, from 1971, once carried a line about the pollution of Lake Erie that was later removed from the book. Dr. Seuss singled the story out as his personal favourite.

Which British insect became a classic case of evolution when soot pollution let a dark form take over?

The peppered moth's dark form almost completely outnumbered the pale one by 1895, because birds picked pale moths off sooty trees. Cleaner air later brought the pale form back.

Which car part, often stolen for the platinum inside, turns toxic exhaust gases into less harmful ones?

A catalytic converter uses precious metals to turn exhaust pollutants into less toxic gases. Most American petrol cars have carried one since the 1975 model year.

Which newly hatched animals crawl toward streetlights, mistaking artificial light for moonlight on the ocean?

Sea turtles hatch on beaches and instinctively head for the brightest glow, once the moon and stars reflected on the water. Turtle-safe lighting uses red or amber lamps, which draw hatchlings far less than white light.

Which Republican president set up the US Environmental Protection Agency?

Richard Nixon proposed the agency in July 1970 and it opened that December, pulling environmental duties scattered across the government into one body.

Which scavenging birds all but vanished from India after eating cattle treated with diclofenac?

Vultures suffer kidney failure from the painkiller, and three species crashed from about 40 million birds across South Asia to roughly 19,000. India banned it for livestock in 2006.

Which animated film follows a lonely robot compacting rubbish on an Earth that humanity has abandoned?

WALL-E is set in 2805, some 700 years after humanity fled a world buried in its own trash. The Pixar film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Which unit measures noise pollution on a scale where each rise of ten means ten times the sound power?

The decibel is one tenth of a bel, a unit named in honour of telephone pioneer Alexander Graham Bell. The Bell System gave the smaller unit its name in 1928.

Which gas seeps from the ground into basements and ranks second only to smoking as a cause of lung cancer?

Radon is denser than air, so it collects in basements and crawlspaces. Among people who have never smoked, it is the number one cause of lung cancer.

Which fireproof mineral fibre, once packed into buildings as insulation, causes the cancer mesothelioma when inhaled?

Asbestos takes its name from a Greek word meaning unquenchable. Using it in construction and fireproofing is now illegal in many countries.

In which American city did flavour chemist Arie Haagen-Smit show that car exhaust was a key ingredient of smog?

Los Angeles sits in a low basin ringed by mountains, which holds dirty air in place. Haagen-Smit began in 1948 by adapting his lab equipment to collect chemicals from the city's air.

Which Japanese city names the 1997 treaty that set binding greenhouse gas targets for industrialised countries?

Kyoto hosted the talks that adopted the treaty on 11 December 1997, though the deal did not enter into force until February 2005.

Which greenhouse gas is belched out by cattle and also seeps from landfills as buried rubbish rots?

Methane is made by microbes called methanogens, which live in cattle guts and in landfills. One study put livestock behind 37% of the methane that human activity releases.

Which disease did physician John Snow trace to a contaminated water pump on London's Broad Street in 1854?

Cholera was blamed on bad air called miasma until Snow's study pointed to germ-contaminated water. A pub named after him now stands beside the site of the pump.

In the 1991 Gulf War, Iraqi forces deliberately poured oil into the sea from a terminal in which country?

Kuwait's Sea Island terminal spilled roughly 70,000 to 80,000 tons of oil a day for a week. Iraq apparently hoped to foil a landing by American Marines on the coast.

Which large seabirds on Midway Atoll feed their chicks tons of floating rubbish, most of it plastic?

Albatrosses on Midway feed their chicks about five tons of debris a year, scooped up while foraging at sea. Some 20 tons of rubbish, 90 percent of it plastic, washes onto the atoll annually.

Which metal poisoned the groundwater of Hinkley, California, in the case that made Erin Brockovich famous?

Chromium in its hexavalent form was used by the utility PG&E as a cheap rust suppressor, then dumped in unlined ponds from 1952 to 1966. Brockovich began investigating in 1993.

Which natural poison in groundwater has sickened vast numbers of people who drink from tube wells in Bangladesh?

Arsenic occurs naturally at high levels in the groundwater that tube wells tap. Across South Asia, many were sunk to give people water free of disease, with this unforeseen side effect.

What name is given to a runaway cascade of collisions among space junk, proposed by NASA scientists in 1978?

The Kessler syndrome is named after Donald Kessler, who warned that every crash in low orbit throws off fragments that cause further crashes. He wrote the 1978 paper with Burton Cour-Palais.

Which Nordic capital names the 2001 treaty targeting the 'dirty dozen' of long-lived toxic chemicals?

Stockholm hosted the May 2001 conference that adopted the pact. Signatories agreed to outlaw nine of the twelve chemicals and to limit the pesticide DDT to malaria control.

Which American engineer, found dead in 1944, developed both the first CFC refrigerants and a notorious petrol additive?

Thomas Midgley saw neither invention banned, as both later were. Disabled by polio, he was strangled by a device he had built to help himself out of bed.

Which DuPont brand name became the everyday word for the CFC gases once used in fridges and air conditioners?

Freon was first produced by Kinetic Chemicals, a company DuPont formed with General Motors in 1930. The gases were prized for being stable and non-toxic, long before their harm to the ozone layer was known.

In which layer of the atmosphere, directly above the one where weather happens, does the ozone layer sit?

The stratosphere holds the ozone layer mainly in its lower portion, roughly 15 to 35 kilometres up. Even there, the gas makes up only a small share of the air.

The ozone layer absorbs nearly all of which type of radiation from the Sun, the kind that causes sunburn?

Ultraviolet light of medium frequency is 97 to 99 percent absorbed by the layer. The same rays build the shield in the first place, by splitting ordinary oxygen molecules.

Which growths on tree bark and stone have scientists used since 1859 as living gauges of air pollution?

Lichens are so sensitive to dirty air that William Nylander devised systematic ways of monitoring with them in 1866. A few hardy species still thrive on city pavements.

What name is given to the contaminated liquid that forms when rain percolates through the waste in a landfill?

Leachate can carry contaminants down into groundwater, so modern landfills are built over impermeable liners of engineered clay or tough membrane to hold it in.

Which Staten Island landfill, opened in 1948 as a temporary dump, grew into the largest in the world?

Fresh Kills was bought in 1946 as worthless swampland and meant to take New York's rubbish for only three years. It closed in 2001 and has since been developed into a park.

Which New York river did General Electric contaminate with PCBs over a 200-mile stretch between 1947 and 1977?

The Hudson's contaminated sediment had to be dredged from the riverbed by the company on federal orders. One local species, the Atlantic tomcod, evolved resistance to the chemicals.

Which European river was poisoned in 1986 by runoff from a fire at the Sandoz chemical store near Basel?

The Rhine lost a large share of its eels to the farm chemicals washed downstream, though the river's wildlife recovered within a couple of years.

Which Marine Corps base in North Carolina supplied tap water laced with harmful chemicals from 1953 to 1987?

Camp Lejeune's water carried contaminants at up to 3,400 times safe levels. Marines and their families drank it and bathed in it for more than three decades.

Which Marshall Islands atoll hosted 1954's Castle Bravo bomb test, whose fallout sickened a Japanese boat crew?

Bikini Atoll's blast dusted the 23 men aboard the Lucky Dragon No. 5 with heavy fallout, and the boat's chief radioman died that September.

Which poison burst from a gold mine's dam near Baia Mare, Romania, in 2000 and flowed on into the Danube?

Cyanide is used to extract gold from mining waste. After the dam burst, one river held over 700 times the permitted level, and the plume crossed Hungary and Serbia.

What name is given to the device in a power station chimney that washes acid gases out of the exhaust?

A scrubber sprays or injects a reagent, sometimes a slurry, into the dirty exhaust stream. Wet versions can also recover heat from the hot gases.

What do meteorologists call a layer of warm air above cooler air that traps smog close to the ground?

An inversion reverses the usual pattern of air cooling with height, so it acts as a lid and stops smoke mixing upwards. The dust trapped beneath one can tint the sky reddish.

Which campaign group traces its start to a 1971 protest voyage toward a nuclear test site on Alaska's Amchitka Island?

Greenpeace calls that voyage aboard the chartered boat Phyllis Cormack its beginning. Activists feared a blast on the unstable island could trigger earthquakes and a tsunami.

Which phrase from a 1968 Garrett Hardin essay describes shared resources, such as clean air, ruined by self-interest?

Tragedy of the commons was Hardin's image of herders each adding cattle to a shared pasture until it is overgrazed. His main worry in the essay was overpopulation.

Peatland fires in which country are the main source of the smoky haze that recurs across Southeast Asia?

Indonesia's peat fires, mostly on Sumatra and Borneo, send smoke drifting over Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, and in severe years as far as Thailand and Vietnam.

Which Arizona city, deliberately curbing light pollution since 1958, became the first International Dark Sky City?

Flagstaff won the title on 24 October 2001, after a local coalition proposed the whole recognition scheme. Observatories in the area had long backed its lighting rules.

Which mathematician and satirist, who entered Harvard at 15, put a song called 'Pollution' on a 1965 album?

Tom Lehrer wrote it for That Was the Year That Was, an album of topical songs that also took on new math and nuclear proliferation.

Underwater noise pollution from naval sonar has been linked to mass strandings of which deep-diving marine mammals?

Beaked whales bolt from mid-frequency sonar, which disrupts their feeding and can drive them ashore. Twelve of the Cuvier's species beached alive in Greece during a NATO sonar test in 1996.

A bacterium found at a bottle-recycling site in Sakai, Japan, can break down and feed on which widely used plastic?

PET, the polyester of drinks bottles, gives the microbe both its carbon and its energy. The strain was isolated from a community of microbes living at the recycling site.

Which infant condition, named for a skin colour, can follow from drinking well water high in fertiliser nitrates?

Blue baby syndrome sets in when nitrates raise levels of methemoglobin, which stops blood releasing oxygen to the tissues. Fertilisers, waste dumps and pit latrines can all load wells with nitrate.

Which market approach, used against American acid rain from 1990, lets power firms buy and sell pollution permits?

Cap and trade set a shrinking national ceiling on power station emissions, aiming to halve them from 1980 levels. Plants that cut more than required could sell or bank their spare allowances.

Which American state contains 'Cancer Alley', a strip of petrochemical plants along the Mississippi River?

Louisiana's strip runs from Baton Rouge toward the Gulf of Mexico and holds over 350 industrial facilities, the largest concentration of petrochemical plants and refineries in the Western Hemisphere.

Which DuPont product was made for decades with PFOA, a chemical dropped after lawsuits over health effects?

Teflon is the brand name for PTFE, the non-stick compound DuPont invented in 1938. GenX, the chemical brought in to replace PFOA, may prove just as harmful.

What name is given to the rock-like masses of congealed grease and flushed wet wipes that block city sewers?

Fatbergs can set as hard as concrete. One found under Whitechapel in London in 2017 weighed 130 tonnes and stretched more than 250 metres, and part of it was converted into biodiesel.

Which green-haired cartoon superhero do five chosen youths summon by combining the powers of magic rings?

Captain Planet was co-created by media mogul Ted Turner as environmental edutainment for children, and the series became known for the famous actors who voiced its villains.