When wastewater is discharge into a river or directly into the sea, the belief by many is that the waste has been safely discharged. However many pathogenic bacteria, the most toxic of chemicals and microplastic float in the surface micro layer SML of the ocean. The SML is 1mm thick, it covers 100% of the worlds oceans and 71% of the planet.
The SML surface layer has 500 times higher concentration of chemicals, bacteria, plastic particles and partially combusted carbon than the underlying water.
Sea spray aerosols are responsible for 80% of cloud formation by nucleating water vapour. The smell of the sea used to be a marine plankton called a coccolithophore, now the smell of the ocean is pollution. When aerosols are formed by bubbles bursting through the SML layer, the airborne aerosols are contaminated by everything that was in the SML layer.
Pathogenic bacteria, plastic and toxic chemicals are returned back to land, to contaminated all plants, agriculture, water supplies and our atmosphere. The suffering, and cost implications to public health and societies is difficult to quantify. For small rural communities it has been estimated that for every dollar spent on sanitation, the return is 20 fold. It is likely to be a similar number of even greater for high income countries, but the cause and effect are further apart, so it is not considered.
Pollution now causes more deaths than all wars, and infectious diseases combined (from Lancet Planetary Health Report)
The following is a report recently published on the subject.
https://lnkd.in/eZYgX2TH
https://lnkd.in/ev6_2cXN
#water#health#cloud#cloud#marine#agriculture#dollar#publichealth
