Causes Of Water Pollution

SURFACE WATER POLLUTION: FACTORS AND IMPLICATIONS

Surface water includes water bodies on the earth 's crust such as well, river, lake, pond, stream, ocean. The water we use for our daily purposes and supplied by the municipalities mostly includes surface water primarily from river catchments. Water for agriculture is taken from rivers; it used to be taken from wells also but now it has shifted to bore wells mostly. Pollution refers to the presence of foreign matter in the resource which degrades the quality of the resource and may cause harm to the consumers.

Surface water pollution occurs in many ways. They could be solid or liquid discharge from households and industries and agricultural lands entering the waterways. Rivers get polluted due to industrial effluents, agricultural leachate, household and tourism wastes. Lakes also get polluted from industrial effluents and other sources one among the main contributors being tourism. Oceans are vast water bodies, and large quantities of wastes have been dumped into them under the assumption that its not a serious problem. But recently many reports show that ocean waste is accumulating at remote sea shores causing problems to the local people there. This has brought into light that dumping waste in oceans is not sustainable.

Earlier, the wetlands used to help filter out a major share of the pollutants from the runoff before it joins the surface water. As cities expanded, most of the wetlands got converted for construction