1.

Cases of Water Pollution highlight Lack of effective Law Enforcement

Factories pump plenty of toxic effluents into some of Malaysia's rivers. Photo Credit: Emaze

The water of Sungai Semantan in Pahang recently became so badly polluted that two local water
treatment plants had to be shut down, leaving locals without clean water. That’s a fact. What
remains to be determined is who is responsible. The likely culprits: three factories that may have
been dumping toxic wastes into the river.

Over in the Klang Valley, many residents likewise had to go without fresh water after treatment
plants were closed down as a result of foul smells that had begun emanating from local water
sources. There, too, the likely culprits were local factories.

Malaysians are rightfully angered over official negligence that has allowed such states of affairs
to endure. Many of the country’s rivers are notoriously polluted: several of them, including some
on the island of Penang, have turned into little more than open sewers.

Wanton pollution in urban areas is one of the causes for this sad state of affairs. Another is soil
erosion from developments and farming, which has resulted in many rivers silting up. An
obvious solution would be to extend buffer zones further inland on the banks of vulnerable rivers
so that the added areas could serve as filters for all the mud and debris that washes down from
riverside developments and farms.

Yet rather than working on that, officials have instead turned a blind eye to ever further
encroachments on river banks. Even factories have been allowed to operate right on river banks,
thereby making it certain that plenty of untreated waste and other effluents are pumped directly
into rivers (or at least allowed to leach into them). Such industrial encroachments pose clear and
present dangers to nearby rivers and to the health of people and animals who depend on the
water of rivers for sustenance.
The Environmental Quality Act of 1974 prescribes a fine of up to RM100,000 and/or a jail term
of up to five years for those found to have been willfully or negligently polluting rivers. Yet
culprits have to date rarely been taken to account. And even those that have been taken to
account have been left off with mere slaps on the wrist: a fine and a warning, invariably.

“If you notice, action will only be taken once the pollution causes a shutdown and only the main
culprits are fined,” Malaysian Water Forum research and policy executive Nah Kok Wai told the
Star Online newspaper. “However, there are also others involved on a smaller scale, who had
contributed to the shutdown, but they get away scot-free.” He added: “[T]he laws are actually
good but sadly the enforcement is poor. Why wait for something to happen and only then take
action?”

And so it goes: Laws remain unenforced to the detriment of Malaysia’s environment. Unless
polluters are brought to justice, river pollution is sadly here to stay.
2. Water Pollution remains an Acute Problem

We must stop treating our rivers as open sewers. Photo Credit: Flickr

A chicken farm making fertilizer from chicken droppings in Johor let large amounts of ammonia
leach into the Johor River sporadically. As a result, much of the river’s water became badly
polluted, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without clean tap water. A local waterworks
also had to close down for a weekend to deal with the large amounts of pollutants in the river.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that after some pressure the state government has decided
to shut down the farm.

Yet this incident is just one of the latest in a series of similar incidents that indicate that many of
Malaysia’s water sources are in a parlous state. From Sabah to Penang, they are already badly
polluted or else at perennial risk of being polluted by locals and local businesses alike. In Johor
itself just the other day Hasni Mohammad, chairman of State Works at the Rural and Regional
Development Committee, called for harsher laws to better protect the state’s rivers.

“Laws related to water pollution offences and enforcement practised in those agencies differed
from one another,” he explained. “The Johor state government is of the opinion that the laws did
not really reflect the importance for us to regulate or monitor all forms of threats to our existing
(water) resources.”
In a like vein, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment has decried “illegal factories
and farms [that] pollute our waterways and environment for their own gain.” The ministry has
urged local authorities to “look into this matter seriously and expeditiously in order to prosecute
the chicken farm owners for jeopardising the lives and livelihood of 600,000 people in the
vicinity to the full extent of existing laws and enforce based on their jurisdiction.”
In the meantime, the ministry is drafting a new bill to standardize the management of the
country’s water resources in all the states. If passed, the new legislation would help establish
much clearer rules and guidelines on water usage both by citizens and businesses. “The present
water policy is fragmented across the different states. Under this new proposal, there will be a
central monitoring committee (to oversee the states),” Minister Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar
has said. “We are not taking away the rights of the states,” he elucidated. “We are just providing
the rules, the framework and how to manage (the water resources).”

More or better laws alone won’t be enough, however. What’s needed is a change in attitude
about how we treat our water sources. We must stop treating rivers and canals as nothing but
watery sewers into which we dump our daily waste, be it household waste or industrial waste.
Instead, we will need to start treating their water sources as the precious resources as they are.
3. Delhi may get polluted water supply this festive season

HARIDWAR: Delhi may get untreated and polluted water for drinking purposes in the upcoming
days.
The annual closing of the Upper Ganga Canal at Haridwar has commenced from October 8 for
maintenance work. Earlier, whenever the canal was closed it resulted in the shortage of water
supply to the capital as the supply from the Upper Ganga Canal was stopped completely.
However, this time, Irrigation Department of Uttar Pradesh has decided to supply Ganga water
which has been stored at different regulators of the canal. Problem with the water supply from
the regulators is that the untreated water from various drains directly enters the canal polluting it,
as per sources.

The canal will stay closed till November 7 this year.

Around 500 cusec water is released to Delhi everyday for drinking purposes from the Upper
Ganga canal which closes every year from the Dussehra week till Diwali. The decision was taken
to supply stored water to the national capital region because Delhi often faces water crisis, due to
the closure of the canal. Whereas, concerns regarding the water’s quality are putting a question
mark over the decision.
4. In the Sea, Not All Plastic Lasts Forever
Polystyrene, a common ocean pollutant, decomposes in sunlight much faster than
thought, a new study finds.

Plastic and Styrofoam litter the shore in Jakarta, Indonesia. Polystyrene was thought to take
thousands of years to decompose, but a new study suggests it can happen in just
decades.Credit...Willy Kurniawan/Reuters
By William J. Broad
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A major component of ocean pollution is less devastating and more manageable than usually
portrayed, according to a scientific team at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape
Cod, Mass., and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Previous studies, including one last year by the United Nations Environment Program, have
estimated that polystyrene, a ubiquitous plastic found in trash, could take thousands of years to
degrade, making it nearly eternal. But in a new paper, five scientists found that sunlight can
degrade polystyrene in centuries or even decades.

“Policymakers generally assume that polystyrene lasts forever,” Collin P. Ward, a marine
chemist at Woods Hole and the study’s lead author said in a statement on Thursday. “That’s part
of the justification for writing policy that bans it.” A main rationale for his team’s study, he
added, “was to understand if polystyrene actually does last forever.”

Polystyrene, one form of which often carries the brand name Styrofoam, is used to manufacture
single-use cups, straws, yogurt containers, disposable razors, plastic tableware, packing materials
and many other everyday items, which are discarded daily by the ton. Much of it ends up in the
ocean. A swirling mass of throwaway junk known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, located
between Hawaii and California, is estimated to occupy an area roughly twice the size of Texas.

Many nations, companies, citizen groups and ocean institutes, as well as United Nations
programs, have worked hard to ban single-use items and better regulate their disposal.

“We’re not calling the concerns or the actions wrong,” Christopher M. Reddy, a marine chemist
at Woods Hole and another author on the study, said in an interview. “We just have a new thread
to add and we think it’s significant.”

The study was published Thursday in the journal Environmental Science and Technology
Letters, a publication of the American Chemical Society, a scientific group based in Washington.

The research was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Frank and Lisina Hoch
Endowed Fund at Woods Hole, the Stanley Watson Chair in Oceanography at Woods Hole and a
graduate research fellowship from the National Science Foundation, a federal agency.
It’s common knowledge that sunlight can cause plastics to weather. “Just look at plastic
playground toys, park benches, or lawn chairs, which can rapidly become sun-bleached,” Dr.
Ward noted in the Woods Hole statement.

A ship from the Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit organizing, using a prototype net to capture plastic
debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.Credit...The Ocean Cleanup/EPA, via Shutterstock

The new study demonstrated that sunlight does even more, breaking down polystyrene into basic
chemical units of organic carbon, which dissolves in seawater, and trace amounts of carbon
dioxide, at levels far too low to play a role in climate change. By the end of this process the
plastic has effectively disappeared from the environment.

In the paper, the researchers described the study as “the first direct evidence” of how of sunlight
can break down polystyrene in the environment into its basic chemical building blocks.

Previous studies focused largely on the degrading effect of microbes. That made sense, Dr.
Reddy, said, because microbes can eat many forms of organic carbon. But, he added, the
chemical structure of polystyrene — particularly its backbone of large, ringed molecules —
made the plastic unappetizing to decomposing bacteria.

However, that same molecular backbone turned out to be “the perfect shape and size to catch
certain frequencies of sunlight,” Dr. Reddy said. And the energy that is absorbed breaks the
chemical bonds.
In the lab, the researchers tested five different samples of polystyrene to see if sunlight could tear
them apart. The team submerged each sample in a sealed glass container of water and exposed it
to light from a solar simulator, a special lamp that mimics the frequencies of sunlight. The
scientists then studied the water for evidence of breakdown products.

With sophisticated tools of detection and analysis, Dr. Ward and his colleagues then traced the
origin of the loose materials back to the polystyrene. “We used multiple methods, and they all
pointed to the same outcome,” he said in the statement: sunlight can turn polystyrene from a
solid material back into basic chemical units.

The study also found that additives to polystyrene, which can determine its color, flexibility and
other physical features, can slow or speed decomposition.

In a joint interview, Dr. Ward and Dr. Reddy said that one remaining puzzle concerns the exact
nature of the dissolved organic carbon, which is too small in size to form visible particles. “We
feel confident we can figure it out,” Dr. Reddy said.

The research team included Cassia J. Armstrong and Julia H. Jackson of Woods Hole, and Anna
N. Walsh of Woods Hole and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the paper, the authors noted that the newly identified means of polystyrene breakdown
“should be incorporated into global fate models” for plastics and help frame policy. None of the
current inventories “account for degradation,” Dr. Ward noted.

In the interview, he and Dr. Reddy suggested that the new finding might eventually shed light on
one of the outstanding mysteries of ocean pollution: that more than 99 percent of the plastic that
should be identifiable is missing. Expeditions that have specifically looked for evidence of the
calculated mass of plastic have repeatedly come up with surprisingly low returns.

In time, Dr. Ward said, the accelerating search for the breakdown products of polystyrene and
other kinds of oceanic pollution may let scientists “balance the books.”
5. Water Pollution facts

This article deals with water pollution facts that the world must be made aware of.
With sincere efforts directed towards reducing water pollution,one can hope to have clean
water resources for future generations.
A simple definition of water pollution can be presented as “contamination of
water which makes it unfit for use”. Most of the water resources on earth are polluted.
Even thought our planet is covered with 70% water,not all of it is suitable for human use.
Rapid industrialization, misuse of the scarce water resources and many other factor play a
role in the process of water pollution. Every year around 400 billion tons of waste in
generated the world over. Most of this waste is dumped in water bodies. Out of the total
water on earth just 3% is freshwater. If this freshwater is polluted repeatedly,water crisis
would turn grave in the near future. It is therefore, necessary to take proper care of our
water resources. The facts about water pollution presented in the article should help in
understanding the gravity of this problem. Let us understand more about water pollution
throught details presented below.