Hello everyone! Welcome back to today’s post. For the next few posts, the theme will be land pollution! As most humans live on land, we need to make sure that we take good care of the very land we live on. Additionally, land pollution reduces the Earth’s ability to provide important ecosystem services we rely on, such as food, clean water and even protecting us from climate change (Metzger, Rounsevell, Acosta-Michlik, Leemans, & Schröter, 2006).
If you have been following our blog, you may have realised that many sources of air and water pollution actually originate from the land! As we learnt from the Pollution Transfer Continuum, the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere and biosphere are extremely interconnected. Pollution in one would affect the other, especially because we do not drink or breathe in “land” like we do for water and air, this interconnectedness is what causes land pollution to affect us.
Source: https://eschooltoday.com/learn/interaction/
Amongst the various forms of land pollution, we shall focus on a few major ones, such as improper waste disposal, agriculture and mining. We also seek to illustrate some of the interactions between the various forms of pollution we have learnt thus far.
Improper waste disposal and leaching
The first source of land pollution is the leaching of improperly disposed waste. In the case of landfill leachate, the pollutants from the waste can leak into water sources, causing water pollution (Kjeldsen et al., 2002). Improper waste disposal also affects humans directly through its unpleasant smell due to rot, or other increase risks of fires and injuries (Hill, 2010). We will investigate waste pollution and discuss leaching in our future posts, so stay tuned!
Source: https://www.justonewayticket.com/2014/05/11/smokey-mountain-a-walk-through-the-slums-of-manila-philippines/
Agriculture and desertification
Another source of land pollution relates to agriculture. To combat the effects of infertile soil, we introduce fertilisers to promote growth. However, farmers tend to apply more than necessary. The excess fertilisers, particularly its phosphorus and nitrogen, can enter the hydrosphere and atmosphere, bringing about detrimental effects such as eutrophication and acid rain (EPA, 2020).
An extreme impact of agricultural land pollution is desertification, where once arable land becomes rendered unusable (Horrigan, Lawrence, & Walker, 2002). Desertification causes serious impacts to the environment as it reduces ecosystem services that the land could have provided and also reduces the amount of arable land, resulting in a vicious cycle (Sivakumar, 2007).
Mining and fracking
The last source of land pollution we are looking at is mining. The extraction of resources from Earth causes water and land pollution as heavy metals contaminate the soil and surrounding aquifers (Wang, Dong, Zhou, & Luo, 2019; Yang et al., 2018).
In the case of fracking, water is pumped to substitute the extracted gas and oil from shale rock. The heavy use of water for fracking has caused other environmental issues such as land subsidence and societal issues such as lack of clean drinking water (Jones, Hillier, & Comfort, 2013). Land subsidence directly affects us as it can literally cause cities to sink and displace many densely populated coastal cities such as Jakarta (Mayuri & Hidayat, 2018).
Source: Zonn, Zhiltsov, & Semenov (2016)
A macro view on land pollution
As seen from these three examples, land pollution occurs both directly and indirectly, interacting with the hydrosphere and atmosphere. Additionally, land pollution can affect our biosphere such as plants and animals are victims of our pollution too. To learn more about environmental pollution and its effects on the forests, do check out Ivy and Dylan’s blog: For Forest’s Sake.
Defining land pollution
While our theme focuses on land pollution, we need to consider how these interactions further degrade and pollute our environment. As mentioned, we will also investigate specific types of pollutants with respect to these various “themes” that we have initially set out (water, air and land).
Putting all these into consideration, we will define land pollution as:
“The introduction of physical, chemical or biological contaminant(s) that can directly or indirectly cause harm and/or decrease the benefits of the usage of land, water, air or any other mediums”.
The main difference of this week’s definition is a more explicit description of the Pollution Transfer Continuum due to its significance when it comes to land pollution, while not forgetting the direct impacts land pollution can cause land users. Next week, we shall look at how Singapore defines land pollution!
See you there!
Ryan
References
EPA. (2020). Nutrient Pollution. EPA. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/nutrientpollution/sources-and-solutions-agriculture
Hill, M. K. (2010). Understanding Environmental Pollution: Cambridge University Press.
Horrigan, L., Lawrence, R. S., & Walker, P. (2002). How sustainable agriculture can address the environmental and human health harms of industrial agriculture. Environmental health perspectives, 110(5), 445-456.
Jones, P., Hillier, D., & Comfort, D. (2013). Fracking and public relations: rehearsing the arguments and making the case. Journal of Public Affairs, 13(4), 384-390.
Kjeldsen, P., Barlaz, M. A., Rooker, A. P., Baun, A., Ledin, A., & Christensen, T. H. (2002). Present and long-term composition of MSW landfill leachate: a review. Critical reviews in environmental science and technology, 32(4), 297-336.
Mayuri, M. L., & Hidayat, R. (2018). Jakarta, the fastest-sinking city in the world. BBC. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44636934
Metzger, M., Rounsevell, M., Acosta-Michlik, L., Leemans, R., & Schröter, D. (2006). The vulnerability of ecosystem services to land use change. Agriculture, ecosystems & environment, 114(1), 69-85.
Sivakumar, M. (2007). Interactions between climate and desertification. Agricultural and forest meteorology, 142(2-4), 143-155.
Wang, Y., Dong, R., Zhou, Y., & Luo, X. (2019). Characteristics of groundwater discharge to river and related heavy metal transportation in a mountain mining area of Dabaoshan, Southern China. Science of the total environment, 679, 346-358.
Yang, Q., Li, Z., Lu, X., Duan, Q., Huang, L., & Bi, J. (2018). A review of soil heavy metal pollution from industrial and agricultural regions in China: Pollution and risk assessment. Science of the total environment, 642, 690-700.
Zonn, I. S., Zhiltsov, S. S., & Semenov, A. V. (2016). Shale gas production and environmental concerns. In Shale Gas: Ecology, Politics, Economy (pp. 225-237): Springer.