Interesting Facts About Water Pollution
- While many parts of the world face major challenges due to limited freshwater availability, a significant amount of the limited freshwater resources in the world are contaminated by pollutants from industry, farming, energy generation, and other activities.
- The Mississippi River carries an estimated 1.5 million metric tons of nitrogen pollution into the Gulf of Mexico each year, creating a “dead zone” in the Gulf each summer about the size of New Jersey.
- Approximately 40% of the lakes in America are too polluted for fishing, aquatic life, or swimming.
- Each year 1.2 trillion gallons of untreated sewage, storm water, and industrial waste are dumped into US water.
- Every day, 2 million tons of sewage and industrial and agricultural waste are discharged into the world’s water the equivalent of the weight of the entire human population of 6.8 billion people.
- Tens of millions of people in Bangladesh have been exposed to poisonous levels of arsenic from contaminated groundwater.
- In developing countries, 70 percent of industrial wastes are dumped untreated into waters, polluting the usable water supply.”
- More than 80% of sewage in developing countries is discharged untreated, polluting rivers, lakes and coastal areas.
- About 10% of America’s beaches fail to meet the federal benchmark for what constitutes safe swimming water.
- Federal authorities estimate that the headwaters of 40 percent of Western rivers are tainted with toxic discharge from abandoned mines.
- In the United States there are thought to be over 20,000 known abandoned and uncontrolled hazardous waste sites and these sites could contaminate the groundwater if there is a leak.
- The annual discharge of sewage and industrial waste in the Yangtze River has reached about 25 billion tons.
- More than 70 percent of China’s rivers and lakes are polluted, government reports have said, and almost half may contain water that is unfit for human consumption or contact.
- Every year, more people die from unsafe water than from all forms of violence, including war.
- Nitrate from agriculture is the most common chemical contaminant in the world’s groundwater aquifers.