Question: Will humans be able to stop pollution? And how?

Susan Cartwright answered on 20 Jun 2015:

Stop, probably not. Reduce, yes. How, attack on multiple fronts.

Pollution, basically, is the introduction of unwanted contaminants into the environment. This mostly concerns chemicals, though we do also talk about noise pollution, light pollution, etc. There are numerous different types of pollutants, and numerous different sources, so there isn’t going to be a single magic technology that will “stop pollution”.

Stopping pollution altogether is probably unrealistic: civilisation depends on lots of processes that produce waste products, and we can’t get rid of all of them. But what we can aim to do is to reduce waste in all aspects of our lives. This will include recycling more efficiently and using fewer non-recyclable products; changing our energy sources from fossil fuels; being more efficient in our use of resources, e.g. less packaging in shops; and trying to clean up earlier generations’ mess.

This is not going to be easy. To take one example, consumer electronics contain a lot of materials that can and should be recycled, but you need to separate them into their different components to do so, and this is difficult and labour-intensive. It *is* cost-effective to disassemble a mobile phone at the end of its life and recycle its components, but not very – Wikipedia quotes a cost of $0.18 and a revenue of $0.75 per phone, but the source is someone’s MSc thesis so I’m not sure how reliable it is. However, even if it’s not very profitable, it’s a great improvement on dumping them in landfill – especially as some of the metals used in mobiles, such as lead, are toxic.

Trying to list all the different pollutants and all the things we should be doing about them would take me till the end of next week! The take-home message is that I’m afraid your generation is going to have to shoulder the burden of cleaning up my generation’s mess. We were the Age of Plastic – you’d better not be!