Pollution Management Strategies

Key Questions
1. What challenges does each type of pollution present?
2. Why?
3. What can be or is being done?

Three level model
-Human activity producing pollutants
+Altering human activity through education, incentives, and penalties to promote:
*Development of alternative technology
*Adoption of alternative lifestyles
*Reducing, reusing, recycling

-Release of pollutants into environment
+ Regulating and reducing point of emissions
*Standards
*Measures to extract pollutants from emissions

-Long-term impact of pollutants on ecosystem
+ Cleaning up pollutants and restoring ecosystems
*Extracting and removing pollutants from ecosystem
*Replanting and restocking animal populations

How to Assess Pollution

Notes Jan. 18 (cont. from yesterday)

Direct Methods
-In situ (field work)

• It is reliable
• It gives straightforward data.
• Measures directly in the source.
  
• Can have technical difficulties (Instruments: costly or not portable)

- Ex Situ (lab work)

• Use a wider variety of methods and instruments
• More flexible (Test more variables, have more repetitions)
• Samples are not fresh. The time after the sample was extracted may affect it and alter the results.

Direct measurements can assess
*Concentration of gases
*Particulate matter
*pH
*Dissolved oxygen in water
*Biomass content
*Salts
*Conductivity
*Turbidity
*Temperature
*Density

Indirect measurement is done through
*BOD
*Indicator species
*Biodiversity
*Spectroscopy
*Chromatography

Pollution Management

Detection and monitoring of pollution can be done directly or indirectly

Directly: Measuring the concentration of pollutants

• Acidity of rain
• Amount of gases in atmosphere or emissions
• Soil pH
• Concentration of nitrates, phosphates, sulfates in soil and water
• Amount of organic matter in soil and water
• Amount of bacteria
• Concentration of (heavy) metals
• BOD (biochemical oxygen demand: the amount of oxygen used by microorganisms to break down organic matter in water): used to determine the pollution of water. The greater the BOD, the more pollution.
  

Indirectly

• Absence or presence of indicator species
•