Imagine yourself to be a bit of chemical substance that if someone swallows you, they can get very ill. You are flushed down the kitchen sink and you find yourself surrounded by the water that helped to flush you down the sink. You travel through many pipes and end up in a larger pipe and join many other chemical friends who, like you, were also flushed down a sink. You eventually are taken to a large tank where you are treated and all the bad substances are removed.
You do have a friend who is also a harmful chemical but he was not flushed down a kitchen sink. Rather, he was placed on someone’s lawn because he has the ability to kill the weeds that were threatening to kill the grass on that lawn. He remained on the lawn for three days and then it rained and he dissolved in the rain water and escaped downwards into the ground. He stayed there for a while and the owner of the lawn has a sprinkler which provided more water that helped to push your chemical friend down even further into the ground.
Eventually, your chemical friend joined the water underground and escaped into one of the rivers nearby. He was able to do that because he was not flushed down a sink and captured in a sewer system before he was able to get into a river or the underground fresh water system.
Your chemical friend has billions of other friends like him. They can be found on road surfaces, in farms where lots of chemicals are placed on fruits and vegetables and grains and other crops, on golf courses to make the greens look really nice and so on. While these chemicals are useful, we tend to put more than needed and so the excess chemicals escape and end up polluting our fresh water.
This is a huge issue for everyone because we all use fresh water since we cannot live without it. The water must also be pure as polluted water can make us very ill.
In our next lesson, we will look at some of the things that we can do to help to fix and reduce this problem of water pollution in our environment.