What pollutants do you think do the most damage and why?

The issue at the hand is what kind of pollutants do the most damage to our planet. It was and it is still one of the most popular topics to be discussed in the past few decades. What does a pollutant mean? A pollutant is simply a waste. As a human being makes progress in development, the amount of the pollutants produced by him tends to increase. Although there are many pollutants on this planet, I am going to bring only three most dangerous examples of pollutants to which, in my opinion, should be paid more attention. They are freons, heavy metals, and carbon oxides.

Freon, an organic compound which was widely used in the manufacture until 1989. Refrigerator, is one of the well-known products where freon was used. And it was also used in military aircrafts, extinguishers, etc. But the interesting thing about this compound is that it almost never decomposes. And once this compound was created or produced there is no way back. One might still wonder how does this compound effect our lifes. And the answer for that is freons deplete ozone layears. These ozone layers protect living things, including humans, from the solar radiation. Otherwise, there would be no life on the Earth. Fortunately, the use and production of this compound was prohibited by Montreal Protocol in 1989. And this is how responded Kofi Annan for the signed convention, and I quote: “perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date has been the Montreal Protocol”.

The next dangerous pollutant is a heavy metal and nowadays they can be found everywhere due to the development of industry. Every developed country tries to use this part of industry as an advantage in economic sustainability. Heavy metals can be used in the gold production, in nuclear power plants, etc. Although heavy metals are part of the planet, the inappropriate use of these elements in the industry can cause many disasters. There are many notorious cases like Chernobyl disaster, Three mile island disaster, etc. Not only it poisons birds and other wildlife in the area, but also it can alter genetic material of all the living things for thousands of years. Pollution of this source can be deadly and have really bad consequences.

The last and most dangerous pollutant is carbon oxide. A human produces carbon dioxide while breathing. And many scientists proved that global warming occured exactly due to the increase of the carbon oxides in the atmosphere. The decrease of snow level, the rise of sea level and temperature are all undesired effects of global warming, or also known as “Greenhouse effect”. To put it differently, “Greenhouse effect” is the increase of the temperature due to the presence of gases that absorb and emit infrared radiation in the atmosphere. And carbon oxide is one of these gases that play a big role because all the organic compounds like gasoline, kerosene, and even coal produce carbon oxide when they are burned. And nature, that tends to balance everything on the planet, can not convert these produced big amount of gases back to oxygen. As an output, the temperature increases and ice tends to melt. This means that our world can end up flooded under the water.

To sum up, there many pollutants that do damage to our planet and also to our life. But the progress in industry and technology makes these three polltants, that I mentioned, the most crucial and dangerous pollutants in 21th century. This topic is very important because every mistake made today will have bad consequences tommorow. And I assume that a human being is the only one who is responsible for preventing those undesired results to happen.

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