How does sewage affect the environment

Litter items such as 6-pack ring packaging can get caught in marine animals and may result in death. Different items take different lengths of time to degrade in water: Cardboard — Takes 2 weeks to degrade What Is.

Sewage is the term used for wastewater that often contains faeces, urine and laundry waste. There are billions of people on Earth, so treating sewage is a big priority. Untreated sewage water in such areas can contaminate the environment and cause diseases such as diarrhoea. Sewage in developed countries is carried away from the home quickly and hygienically through sewage pipes. Sewage is treated in water treatment plants and the waste is often disposed into the sea.

Sewage is mainly biodegradable and most of it is broken down in the environment. In developed countries, sewage often causes problems when people flush chemical and pharmaceutical substances down the toilet.

When people are ill, sewage often carries harmful viruses and bacteria into the environment causing health problems. Types of Water Pollution. Microplastic The Giant Issue of Microplastics First, we will have a look at the background story on micro-plastics, and then we will go into detail on how the situation regarding micro-plastics in our environment impacts us today.

Eutrophication and Water Pollution Eutrophication is when the environment becomes enriched with nutrients. In many poor areas of the world, sewage is dumped into local waterways, in the absence of practical alternatives. Untreated sewage poses a major risk to human health since it contains waterborne pathogens that can cause serious human illness.

Untreated sewage also destroys aquatic ecosystems, threatening human livelihoods, when the associated biological oxygen demand and nutrient loading deplete oxygen in the water to levels too low to sustain life. As a result, surface waters in many urban areas are highly contaminated with human waste. In areas with pit latrines, seepage into local groundwater is often a major problem, since many communities rely on shallow wells for drinking water.

Sewage can be intentionally discharged to waterways through pipes or open defecation, or unintentionally during rainfall events. When humans use these waterways for drinking, bathing or washing, they are exposed to the associated pathogens, many of which can live for extended periods of time in aquatic environments.

Sometimes humans can even become ill from inhaling contaminated water droplets. Life-threatening human pathogens carried by sewage include cholera, typhoid and dysentery. To see if my observations held more broadly, in , I surveyed hundreds of marine resource managers mostly focused on coral reefs to see what their big problems are and what they are doing to address them.

The results confirmed my personal observations — coastal pollution is a big problem … but very little attention is given to it. Survey respondents cited a lot of valid reasons given for this, none of which will surprise you. They include lack of government mandates, other priorities for funders and stakeholders, and politics. You can read the full survey findings here. So we certainly have some challenges to overcome when it comes to addressing coastal pollution.

But there are also opportunities — in particular, around sewage pollution, one of the biggest contributors to coastal pollution. In some places, the percentage is even higher e. And you can be pretty sure that if you have raw or partially treated sewage going into your coastal waters, it is causing problems. Many people assume the only problem is eutrophication, and this is indeed a big concern for many habitat types. But there are many other things in household sewage that are harmful to marine ecosystems , including pharmaceuticals, heavy metals, and endocrine disruptors.

These contaminants impact coral reproduction, growth, vulnerability to disease, and more. And sewage pollution can also mean desalination, sedimentation, shading, and the introduction of pathogens to marine ecosystems. This is awful and gross, I know, but sewage pollution is also exciting in a way. So many of the challenges we face today are daunting because there is no clear way forward to mitigate the threat e.

Effective sewage treatments already exist. There are likely many reasons why sewage pollution has been ignored at a global scale. Sewage is not a sexy problem. In addition, sewage pollution is often invisible and hard to identify, silently seeping into coastal waters from different sources, although we are getting better at identifying it and finding the sources. Ignoring sewage pollution undermines marine protected areas, habitat restoration, fisheries, and anything else that depends on good water quality — pretty much all our conservation and management goals.

So, if you are not already working to mitigate this threat, where do you start?