Persistent Organic Pollutants

All these chemicals that are called POPS ,act as irritants to humans and animals ,we inhale them or eat them unknowingly in our food . Some are now banned but are still in our environment,it was said in the 70s that DDT was in the ice at the poles . Many fish and seals etc have developed strange illnesses,because of these. Some of these pollutants :Lead ,Mercury,Cadmium,Arsenic,Aluminuim,these enter the food chain via the ground in food and water. Lead ,chlorine ,dioxins ,sulphur,we can add to these some greenhouse gases Carbon dioxide,methane,nitrous oxide ,clorofluorocarbons aircraft are responsible for these. see ...  Read the complete review

Please do not give me any grief on my opinion, I was told to write it in this section because it does go into evironmental issues. Cleanliness means different things to diferent people. For instance, when a little boy is told by his mother to wash his hands and face, he may think that holding his fingers under a running faucet and wetting his lips is enough. But mother knows best. She takes him back into the bathroom and scrubs his hands and face with plenty of soap and water, despite his loud protests! Of course, standard of cleanliness are not the same around the world, and people grow up with varying concepts of cleanliness. In times past, a clean, ...  Read the complete review

Okay as I have mentioned to some of you before I am a chemist and I like to inject a little meaningful discussion into debates (if you excuse the pun.) In speakers corner there is a very bad habit of seeing things in black or white when to many issues there are subtle nuances, which complicate issues. It is these nuances that prevent progress on a scale, which many of us would desire. The topic of discussion I have chosen is POPs. Obviously thinking about these pollutants in a simplistic way they are a bad idea. I will take DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) as a case in point. DDT is no longer used in the developed world. It accumulates in the food ...  Read the complete review

People say that they want to help the enviroment, but they end up contradicting themselves, by dropping litter, and using things that can poison wildlife. Farmers are 60% responsible for organic pollution. They may not think it, but in their everyday life, they use pesticides and fertilisers to aid plant growth and improve the percentage of yield of their crops. When they use this, there is always a surplus of the "agrochemical"(another collective mane for farming chemicals) that they use. The surplus leads to fertilisers leaching into rivers. This causes algae, a bacterial plant to bloom, and as a result, leads the bottom layer of the river to die ...  Read the complete review

Foot & Mouth disease and BSE are not natural disasters but come as a direct consequence of a disregard for the intimate relationship between soil, plant, animal and nature generally. Lessons have obviously not been learned from the 1960's. Each time it occurs it seems that the disease strain is stronger and more virulent. The nation could do well to ponder what has been inflicted on our animals. It has been shown, and proved through experiments, that by caring properly for livestock and providing them with healthy, natural food without artificial fertilisers, animals can be resistant to many diseases, including Foot & Mouth. Resistance to the virus is ...  Read the complete review