With Markus Burnette and Arnela Redzepagic

Pollution and its Overall Problems in Society

Ariana Lopez, Arnela Redzepagic, Markus Burnette – Draft

Department of English of The City College of New York 

ENGL 21003: Writing for the Sciences

Professor Anna Voisard

March 22, 2023

Introduction

There is an increasing awareness of pollution in contemporary life. Pollution can manifest itself in a variety of ways, including air pollution, which is caused by several air contaminants and slowly deteriorates human health over time. When water bodies are contaminated by highly toxic chemicals produced by humans in factories, it is referred to as water pollution. The killing of animals, which upsets the food chain because some animals depend on other animals to survive the ongoing cycle, and, most importantly, the inability of people in developing nations to access clean water because of water contamination brought on by our own population and industrial changes.  Then we come to the factor of noise pollution which is harmful today levels of noise could mostly later affect human health and production rates in modern society today. Because since the making of so much technology today it has come to be a natural standard that we hear noise every day, but it seems like we don’t notice how noise will affect us later on in life and why it has been more recognized today in modern society than it has been in previous times of society.

Have you ever heard of pollution? Do you know what pollution is? Pollution is the establishment of harmful contaminants into the environment. Pollution has been a problem for about 4,000 years and is mostly caused by humans. It becomes worse every year with harmful factories, cars, power plants, etc. There are several different types of pollution, three of which will be discussed: air pollution, water pollution and noise pollution. Some types of pollution affect human health more than others but they all tie into the downfall of our environment. Every type of pollution has damaging effects on the environment that affect our daily lives; in recent years awareness has spread and plans to combat pollution have increased.

Air Pollution

One of the main problems with today’s pollution discussions is air pollution. When it comes down to it, air pollution is the one that comes to mind when we think of pollution. Human life is mostly affected by air pollution. As the author pointed out, due to the amount of harmful pollution in the air and being released into it, humans today are unable to even breathe. The fact that human health has declined so dramatically over the past few decades is mostly due to air pollution. Air pollution is a key component to why human health has been so bad in the last coming decades. Air pollution is defined as “harmful materials are called pollutants” (Peerson 2) . Pollutants can be natural, such as volcanic ash. They can also be created by human activity, such as trash or runoff produced by factories. Pollutants damage the quality of air, water, and land”. Air pollution is made of 3 main components that affect human health. Nitrogen Oxide, Ammonia and sulfur dioxide, all these components make up what air pollution is. The Industrial revolution, it has become recognized that it has caused our air to be toxic. It keeps getting filled with toxic chemicals that further affect our human health later in our lives. As the author describes, air pollutants in the air are driven by emissions which are mostly the result of human population which is fossil fuels. So, humans are basically contributing to their own early death to why human health is so bad today and doing nothing to stop air pollution.

         Yet, scientists are recommending various ways to contain it. Although air pollution has already gone close to endangering human health, scientists have found ways to improve society. The scientist adds that we could reduce the air pollutants that produce pollution in the atmosphere if we stood up as a nation and completely stopped ourselves as people from consuming so much energy and only used the newly upgraded energy that has been given to us. The author also adopts the stance of not solely attributing all air pollution-related problems to the United States, but also providing information on air pollution in Asia. The history of air pollution and poor air quality in Asia is extensive. The reason why there are so many factories is that they are a high trade demand continent, so to produce face, they must build more factories to follow through.  In order for scientist to conduct on how to better air pollution, they have gone to Asia measured air to test out the effects of each air quality in the United States and China. Doing this will compare and better the factor of both because with this data both countries could reduce any things in order to better air quality not just for them but for human health.

            But overall if we think about the other types of pollution and different categories air pollution is only a small portion of that part we also take in the matter of water pollution which ties into the air pollution. Water gives the body nutrients and more oxygen in order for the human body to function the way it is supposed to, but this doesn’t stop the fact of water having a big impact overall on the society, not just in good ways but in many bad ways it is not talked about.

Water Pollution

Compared to other kinds of pollution, water pollution is one of the most highly known. Water pollution is at times seen as a problem for the sea life and not us, which is incorrect. Water pollution applies to anything making water impure and unclean. The concentration of water pollution varies in different areas. China’s chemical industrial parks are significant in the development of chemicals. Due to the heightened amount of chemicals, it is difficult to control and purify the water. A solution plan was to conduct a life cycle assessment as a way to analyze the impact of the products and chemicals to the water. Tests were run to reveal the chemicals with negative impacts to the environment and its water.  With the knowledge of the most harmful pollutants, it can help the stop of directly using those chemicals.

Pollution affects several characteristics of water: color, turbidity, temperature, amount of debris and foam, radioactivity, odor, and taste. Color is the least harmful trait affected by pollution since it causes no direct damage. Turbidity and suspended matter, both inflicted due to soil erosion, affect aquatic plants. “Animals will be affected by reduced plant life” (Hunt, 1965, p.3) meaning that sea life depending on those plants as their diet would start to die off due to a food shortage which would eventually affect the whole aquatic food chain. They can both interfere with the vision of fish because it creates a sort of cloudiness in the water but suspended matter can be heavy enough to even crush fish eggs.  A change in temperature that fish are not prepared for could have fatal consequences: “Considerable numbers of dead giz-zard shad were seen from time to time during late winter by me…It was surmised that the sudden change from cool to relatively warm water as the fish swam upstream caused their demise.” (Hunt, 1965, p.6) It is important to stop the spread of radioactive waste in water. In recent years, more power plants, chemical labs, and tragedies have contaminated our waters and all the life in it. Contaminated water is more likely to cause fatalities among the species living in the water.

Water Pollution is a problem that has several campaigns and organizations to raise awareness about it. Spreading awareness alone however, doesn’t solve all problems, “… a recent U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assessment finds that 46% of U.S. rivers and streams are in poor biological condition, 25% are in fair condition, and only 28% are in good condition (EPA, 2016).” (Shortle, 2017, p.1). Agriculture is one of the most harmful causes of decreased water quality. Naturally, healthy plant life equals healthy aquatic life but, in recent years humans have pushed the amount of nutrients way over normal. To solve the problem that’s making agriculture harmful is the “Agricultural Nonpoint Source Policy (ANSP)” which controls the amount of nutrient and soil pollution. For this plan to work there needs to be a motive for farmers to choose to stop over producing. If the ANSP is successful it would heighten water quality and lower the amount spent on controlling water pollution.

Noise Pollution

Noise pollution is harmful levels of noise. An example of noise pollution is construction noise. When there is a constitution happening, this is an example of noise pollution. Also, a lot of people don’t know why this is bad. Besides, what are the effects? According to the (Study on the effect of noise pollution on public health) by L. Floroian, She said “the effects of noise pollution on non-hearing systems, which have been shown to cause many disorders or diseases. One of the non-auditory systems that are affected by noise pollution is the brain and the central nervous system. Discomfort is the most common effect of hearing noises in urban and industrial populations and can disrupt daily activities, feelings, thoughts, sleep and rest and can cause anger, weakness, and other behavioral disorders.” This article showed us that it’s very hard to deal with this illness. Many people don’t know this, but noise pollution does some serious damage to wildlife. Not only is noise pollution bad for our environment, but there are also people out there in the world that suffer from this, and it makes their life hard. They have to wear headphones because sometimes just a simple noise is way too much. The effects are brutal with hearing problems. One of your senses is going away. Then as L. Florian said even if you can’t do daily activities the way you used to because of noise pollution everything starts to bother you. Why is this topic interesting? Why should we be interested in noise pollution? This can even happen in a classroom, according to “Analysis of Parental Opinions on Sound and Noise Pollution in Learning Environments.” Mızrap Bulunuz found that “60% of the parents are of the opinion that the noise in the school is distracting, and the noise they are exposed to is disturbing. Parents do not have a consensus on preventing noise at school. There is a need to increase the awareness of parents about the negative effects of noise.” This shows us that in schools, noise pollution is an issue. This is having a negative effect on kids learning this. Maybe the reason why some kids are bad in school it’s because of the noise. This is the reason why some parents need this to be brought to people’s attention. Also, when the child has this problem, it affects their daily activities very deeply. What are some things that we can do to reduce noise pollution are reducing loud machines in the workplace, use barriers to block direct sound paths and make sure that if you are making a really loud noise it is not positioned at your co-workers. According to Active noise reduction analysis and experimental research on electromagnetic vibration noise of transformers by Zhao Liu said that “electrical equipment on the noise reduction effect was studied. The results showed the overall noise reduction in the experiment was about 6 dB, which proved that the active noise reduction system proposed in this paper is effective.” This is good but many people who suffer from noise pollution may not have the money to have this noise reduction software. Some for right now keep the noise to a minimum.  

Conclusion

Generally, pollution is now widely acknowledged in society, but little action is being made. Although not something that is seen, pollution affects our everyday lives. Air pollution has the most direct effect on humans since we need to intake air to survive. Water pollution can harm aquatic species and water quality. Noise pollution, a type of pollution that isn’t normally spoken of, still has its impact on our day-to-day lives. The health effects of noise pollution increase as time goes on. Noise pollution disrupts attention which lowers productivity meaning less gets done. Pollution is a serious issue that has become even more grave; the making of plans to resolve it has recently increased.

References

1. BULUNUZ, M., & ÖZGÜR, K. (2021). Analysis of Parental Opinions on Sound and Noise Pollution in Learning Environments. Journal of Family Counseling & Education, 6(2), 1–32.

https://web-s-ebscohost-com.ccny-proxy1.libr.ccny.cuny.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=4&sid=ebe78c9d-547d-4b84-9228-af51d555b64e%40redis&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=156238875&db=a9h

2. Crane, K., & Mao, Z. (2015). Costs of Reducing Air Pollution. In Costs of Selected Policies to Address Air Pollution in China (pp. 18–22). RAND Corporation. Retrieved March 13, 2023, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7249/j.ctt14bs468.11
3. FLOROIAN, L., LUNGU, A., & BADEA, M. (2022). Study on the Effect of Noise Pollution on Public Health.  New York. Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brasov, Serials Retrieved March 8,2023, from                         https://doi-org.ccny-proxy1.libr.ccny.cuny.edu/10.31926/but.ms.2022.64.15.1.1
4. Hunt, G. S. (1965). The Direct Effects on Some Plants and Animals of Pollution in the Great Lakes. Retrieved March 12, 2023, from https://www.jstor.org/stable/1293295
5. Liu, Z., Zhu, L., Zhong, S., Wang, Y., & Zhang, J. (2022). Active noise reduction analysis and experimental research on electromagnetic vibration noise of transformer International Journal of Applied Electromagnetics & Mechanics, 70(4), 501–513. https://doi-org.ccny-proxy1.libr.ccny.cuny.edu/10.3233/JAE-220002
6. Lyu, Y., Gao, Y., Ye, H., Liu, Y., Tian, J., & Chen, L. (2021, December 1). Quantifying the life cycle environmental impacts of water pollution control in a typical chemical industrial park in China. Retrieved March 8, 2023, from https://web-s-ebscohost-com.ccny-proxy1.libr.ccny.cuny.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=5&sid=75aaa589-9d2f-46ef-86e3-11a384eb7d78%40redis&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3D%3D#AN=154104009&db=a9h 
7. Panth, B. D. (1963). AIR POLLUTION. Current Science, 32(5), 203–205.  Retrieved March 13, 2023, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/24059450 
8. Persson, L., Arvidson, A., Lannerstad, M., Lindskog, H., Morrissey, T., Nilsson, L., Noel, S., & Senyagwa, J. (2010). AIR POLLUTION. In Impacts of Pollution on Ecosystem Services for the Millennium Development Goals (pp. 7–15). Stockholm Environment  Retrieved March 13, 2023, from Institute. http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep00486.7
9. Shortle, J. (2017). Policy reforms needed for better water quality and lower. Retrieved March 14, 2023, from https://www.jstor.org/stable/26487421

Draft:

Pollution and its Overall Problems in Society

Ariana Lopez, Arnela Redzepagic, Markus Burnette – Draft

Department of English of The City College of New York 

ENGL 21003: Writing for the Sciences

Professor Anna Voisard

March 14, 2023

Pollution and its Overall Problems in Society

Abstract

There is an increasing awareness of pollution in contemporary life. Pollution can manifest itself in a variety of ways, including air pollution, which is caused by several air contaminants and slowly deteriorates human health over time. When water bodies are contaminated by highly toxic chemicals produced by humans in factories, it is referred to as water pollution. The killing of animals, which upsets the food chain because some animals depend on other animals to survive the ongoing cycle, and, most importantly, the inability of people in developing nations to access clean water because of water contamination brought on by our own population and industrial changes.  Then we come to the factor of noise pollution which is harmful today levels of noise could mostly later affect human health and production rates in modern society today. Because since the making of so much technology today it has come to be a natural standard that we hear noise every day, but it seems like we don’t notice how noise will affect us later on in life and why it has been more recognized today in modern society than it has been in previous times of society.

Introduction

Have you ever heard of pollution? Do you know what pollution is? Pollution is the establishment of harmful contaminants into the environment. Pollution has been a problem for about 4,000 years and is mostly caused by humans. It becomes worse every year with harmful factories, cars, power plants, etc. There are several different types of pollution, three of which will be discussed: air pollution, water pollution and noise pollution. Some types of pollution affect human health more than others but they all tie into the downfall of our environment. Every type of pollution has damaging effects on the environment that affect our daily lives; in recent years awareness has spread and plans to combat pollution have increased. 

Air Pollution

One of the main problems with today’s pollution discussions is air pollution. When it comes down to it, air pollution is the one that comes to mind when we think of pollution. Human life is mostly affected by air pollution. As the author pointed out, due to the amount of harmful pollution in the air and being released into it, humans today are unable to even breathe. The fact that human health has declined so dramatically over the past few decades is mostly due to air pollution. Air pollution is a key component to why human health has been so bad in the last coming decades. Air pollution is defined as “harmful materials are called pollutants” (Peerson 2) . Pollutants can be natural, such as volcanic ash. They can also be created by human activity, such as trash or runoff produced by factories. Pollutants damage the quality of air, water, and land”. Air pollution is made of 3 main components that affect human health. Nitrogen Oxide, Ammonia and sulfur dioxide, all these components make up what air pollution is. The Industrial revolution, it has become recognized that it has caused our air to be toxic. It keeps getting filled with toxic chemicals that further affect our human health later in our lives. As the author describes, air pollutants in the air are driven by emissions which are mostly the result of human population which is fossil fuels. So, humans are basically contributing to their own early death to why human health is so bad today and doing nothing to stop air pollution.

         Yet, scientists are recommending various ways to contain it. Although air pollution has already gone close to endangering human health, scientists have found ways to improve society. The scientist adds that we could reduce the air pollutants that produce pollution in the atmosphere if we stood up as a nation and completely stopped ourselves as people from consuming so much energy and only used the newly upgraded energy that has been given to us. The author also adopts the stance of not solely attributing all air pollution-related problems to the United States, but also providing information on air pollution in Asia. The history of air pollution and poor air quality in Asia is extensive. The reason why there are so many factories is that they are a high trade demand continent, so to produce face, they must build more factories to follow through.  In order for scientist to conduct on how to better air pollution, they have gone to Asia measured air to test out the effects of each air quality in the United States and China. Doing this will compare and better the factor of both because with this data both countries could reduce any things in order to better air quality not just for them but for human health. 

            But overall if we think about the other types of pollution and different categories air pollution is only a small portion of that part we also take in the matter of water pollution which ties into the air pollution. Water gives the body nutrients and more oxygen in order for the human body to function the way it is supposed to, but this doesn’t stop the fact of water having a big impact overall on the society, not just in good ways but in many bad ways it is not talked about.

Water Pollution

Compared to other kinds of pollution, water pollution is one of the most highly known. Water pollution is at times seen as a problem for the sealife and not us, which is incorrect. Water pollution applies to anything making water impure and unclean. The concentration of water pollution varies in different areas. China’s chemical industrial parks are significant in the development of chemicals. Due to the heightened amount of chemicals, it is difficult to control and purify the water. A solution plan was to conduct a life cycle assessment as a way to analyze the impact of the products and chemicals to the water. Tests were run to reveal the chemicals with negative impacts to the environment and its water.  With the knowledge of the most harmful pollutants, it can help the stop of directly using those chemicals. 

            Pollution affects several characteristics of water: color, turbidity, temperature, amount of debris and foam, radioactivity, odor, and taste. Color is the least harmful trait affected by pollution since it causes no direct damage. Turbidity and suspended matter, both inflicted due to soil erosion, affect aquatic plants. “Animals will be affected by reduced plant life” (Hunt, 1965, p.3) meaning that sea life depending on those plants as their diet would start to die off due to a food shortage which would eventually affect the whole aquatic food chain. They can both interfere with the vision of fish because it creates a sort of cloudiness in the water but suspended matter can be heavy enough to even crush fish eggs.  A change in temperature that fish are not prepared for could have fatal consequences: “Considerable numbers of dead giz-zard shad were seen from time to time during late winter by me…It was surmised that the sudden change from cool to relatively warm water as the fish swam upstream caused their demise.” (Hunt, 1965, p.6) It is important to stop the spread of radioactive waste in water. In recent years, more power plants, chemical labs, and tragedies have contaminated our waters and all the life in it. Contaminated water is more likely to cause fatalities among the species living in the water.

Water Pollution is a problem that has several campaigns and organizations to raise awareness about it. Spreading awareness alone however, doesn’t solve all problems, “… a recent U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assessment finds that 46% of U.S. rivers and streams are in poor biological condition, 25% are in fair condition, and only 28% are in good condition (EPA, 2016).” (Shortle, 2017, p.1). Agriculture is one of the most harmful causes of decreased water quality. Naturally, healthy plant life equals healthy aquatic life but, in recent years humans have pushed the amount of nutrients way over normal. To solve the problem that’s making agriculture harmful is the “Agricultural Nonpoint Source Policy (ANSP)” which controls the amount of nutrient and soil pollution. For this plan to work there needs to be a motive for farmers to choose to stop over producing. If the ANSP is successful it would heighten water quality and lower the amount spent on controlling water pollution.

Noise Pollution 

Noise pollution is harmful levels of noise. An example of noise pollution is construction noise. When there is a constitution happening, this is an example of noise pollution. Also, a lot of people don’t know why this is bad. Besides, what are the effects? According to the (Study on the effect of noise pollution on public health) by L. Floroian, She said “the effects of noise pollution on non-hearing systems, which have been shown to cause many disorders or diseases. One of the non-auditory systems that are affected by noise pollution is the brain and the central nervous system. Discomfort is the most common effect of hearing noises in urban and industrial populations and can disrupt daily activities, feelings, thoughts, sleep and rest and can cause anger, weakness, and other behavioral disorders.” This article showed us that it’s very hard to deal with this illness. Many people don’t know this, but noise pollution does some serious damage to wildlife. Not only is noise pollution bad for our environment, but there are also people out there in the world that su Then as L. Florian said even if you can’t do daily activities the way you used to because of noise pollution everything starts to bother you. Why is this topic interesting? Why should we be interested in noise pollution? This can even happen in a classroom, according to “Analysis of Parental Opinions on Sound and Noise Pollution in Learning Environments.” Mızrap Bulunuz found that “60% of the parents are of the opinion that the noise in the school is distracting, and the noise they are exposed to is disturbing. Parents do not have a consensus on preventing noise at school. There is a need to increase the awareness of parents about the negative effects of noise.” This shows us that in schools, noise pollution is an issue. This is having a negative effect on kids learning this. Maybe the reason why some kids are bad in school it’s because of the noise. This is the reason why some parents need this to be brought to people’s attention. Also, en the child has this problem, it affects their daily activities very deeply. What are some things that we can do to reduce noise pollution are reducing loud machines in the workplace, ur co-workers. According to Active noise reduction analysis and experimental research on electromagnetic vibration noise of transformers by Zhao Liu said that “electrical equipment on the noise reduction effect was studied. The results showed the overall noise reduction in the experiment was about 6 dB, which proved that the active noise reduction system proposed in this paper is effective.” This is good but many people who suffer from noise pollution may not have the money to have this noise reduction software. Some for right now keep the noise to a minimum.   

Peer Review:

Our Plan for the Project

Self-Assessment:

The Literature Review was a group assignment where, in my case, my group of three chose a general topic to which we divided into three subtopics. We then were asked to read scholarly articles and write a research paper on our topic without giving our opinion. This assignment was the scariest out of all of them because research papers seem super complicated. Before this one, I had only written two before. I wish I had taken more time to read more scholarly articles because I probably would have found better information that way. It was also hard to keep your opinion out of the paper because it seems natural to add your input while writing about something you read. Being in a group made it a bit more relieving because I had a sort of support system that kept me on track with my work. It was a bit challenging to keep the group organized with what to do because our communication was not the best. Overall I think I did well with writing out my informative paragraphs but could have done better with my communication, research, and group organization.