Environmental Question #29 [Chemicals in Wastewater]

What household chemicals and popular items people use every day have the greatest impact on pollution in storm and sanitary wastewater?

Courtesy of Reddit user u/uncivilized_engineer

Q: What household chemicals and popular items people use every day have the greatest impact on pollution in storm and sanitary wastewater? What are the best actions an individual can take to help the environment? 

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A:  Honestly, the greatest impact on the environment through sanitary wastewater aside from plastic, is medicines. Lots of people flush pills, and when those medications get into the ecosystem, they can affect natural creatures in a huge variety of ways. Imagine if all the water you drank and bathed in contained an unknown cocktail of different medications, that certainly couldn't be good. Water treatment plants in the developed world do a good job of cleaning these kind of chemicals out of the tap water, though so tap water is still safe to drink.

I get the sense from your question that you are also thinking about cleaning products in particular, but regulation in the past 20 years or so has done a good job of making cleaning products safer for wastewater. Several nasty cleaning chemicals have been banned for household use, and products no longer have "scrubbing microbeads" made of plastic in them. The vast majority of household cleaning products today are designed to biodegrade or be neutralized naturally when they enter waste water streams. Many harsher and more toxic cleaning chemicals are still used in industrial settings though, so if factories don't dispose of their waste appropriately that is still a potential source of pollution.

The best action an individual can take for the environment is to be absolutely as annoying as possible to your local politicians. That means not just voting for environmentally-focused leaders, but also protesting when appropriate and most importantly showing up to local public meetings. No individual can make as much of a change as a good well-enforced regulation can, so hammer on your leaders until they make real changes.