Pollution, muck, stink and poison

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Arctic in trouble

Pure as the driven snow? No longer: Half of all Inuit women in the Canadian Arctic eat food containing toxic pollutants at levels above those allowed by international standards. Chlordane (a type of pesticide) levels in their breast milk are 10 times higher than in southern Canada. Not good for their babies at all. And the seals, whales, polar bears and fish are contaminated too by nasties like PCBs and heavy metals. A wide variety of toxins turn up in what seem like clear and pure Arctic lakes due to ‘distillation’ from pesticide-laden soil in the tropics. The horrible stuff (the best known is toxaphene) later gets dumped by polluted rainfall in the Arctic because the winds and clouds blow it there from the hot tropics. This means the fish are contaminated and, of course, the people who eat them.

Melting ice in the high Arctic

But I’m less sad now.

Why?

I know you kids can help. It’s not your fault. It’s grown-up people who made all this mess, often because they didn’t even realise what they were doing.Today, all grown-ups know that the climate crisis and the pollution which is causing it is their responsibility. Unfortunately for everybody else, especially the poor people who have neither money nor power, there are many people in the rich world who prefer to pretend nothing is wrong. They find the conspiracy theories that best fit what they want to believe. And so they carry on messing up the planet anyway because they are making lots of money or just don’t care. They don’t care about the future. And, hey, that’s your future!

If someone in your family smokes, you have a problem.

Why?

Because cigarette (and cigar) smoke is one of the most common forms of pollution on the planet. It’s one you’re bound to have come across even if no one in your family smokes. Smoke from cigarettes harms everyone’s health. It even harms people if they don’t smoke themselves but breathe other people’s smoke. So if someone in your family does smoke, why not see if you can help them to stop?

Smoking does no one any good. The best thing is not to start in the first place because smokers find it very hard to give up. They get hooked on stuff in tobacco called nicotine. Nicotine itself is a poison. But the real nasties in tobacco smoke are chemicals  called carcinogens. They cause cancer and loads of other diseases which kill millions of people every year, mostly smokers but also people who don’t smoke.

Why do people smoke? I don’t know; do you? None of my cool penguin friends do. It used to be trendy to smoke but in recent years, many countries have banned smoking in public buildings. The result is that smoking is finally going out of fashion — which is good news for everyone except the tobacco companies. Today, there are many ways to help smokers quit their habit. One of the most popular is called vaping : a smoker wanting to quit ‘smokes’ an e-cigarette instead. And it seems to work — for adults anyway. But there are worries that high school kids may take up vaping which could be a pathway to taking up smoking tobacco.

Click here for some scary facts about smoking

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What smoking does to people

• it kills 434,000 people a year in the USA [1]
• it kills 750,000 people in China each year. One third of 300 million Chinese men now under 30 will be killed by cigarettes unless they quit [11]
• it killed almost 5 million people worldwide in 2000 [16]
• up to 60,000 Americans die each year from secondary smoke (also called ‘passive smoking’ or ‘sidetream smoke’) where people who don’t
• smoke breathe in the pollution from smokers’ cigarettes [12]
• non-smoking adults who regularly breathe cigarette smoke – passive smoking – face a 20% increased risk of cancer [13]
• if your parents smoke, it will damage your lungs too [2]
• more than half of all deaths from smoking are among people between 30 to 69 years of age [16].
• tobacco kills one out of every two people who smoke it. It increases the risk of 24 deadly diseases including cancers, heart disease, strokes and bronchitis[3]
• the World Bank estimates that within 30 years, tobacco will be the leading cause of death in the world, killing 10 million people per year [14]
• smoking can cause impotence in men [4], turn their hair grey or make them bald [10]. It also messes up peoples’ enjoyment of sex [15]
• half of all teenagers who take up the habit will be killed by it [5]
• one quarter of all Americans smoke. Each one smokes around 2538 cigarettes every year [6]
• women who smoke more than 20 cigarettes per day run four times the risk of getting breast cancer [7]
• smokers have a greater risk of going blind in later life [8]
• tobacco advertising of this killer weed is aimed at encouraging young people to smoke by giving them the impression that smoking is cool. [9]

I think smoking is stupid! And I expect you do too after reading all this sad stuff.

1. Science News, 14/05/94, 314-315 et seq. (US Surgeon General’s estimate, 1994); 2. Science News, 02/07/94, 5; 3. New Scientist, 15/10/94, 4; 4. New Scientist, 17/12/94, 12; 5. New Scientist, 22/7/95, 12; 6. New Scientist, 20/7/96, 13; 7. New Scientist, 9/11/96, 4; 8. Science News, 12/10/96, 231; 9. New Scientist, 14/12/96, 4-5; 10. New Scientist, 11/1/97, 26; 11. New Scientist, 6/9/97, 21; 12. Science News, 17/1/98, 36; 13. Science News, 17/11/98, 251; 14. New Scientist, 29/5/99, 15; 15. New Scientist, 9/10/99, 29; 16. MedicineNet, Nov 2004

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Helping smokers quit

Many smokers long to give up. They know their habit is bad for them and for their families. But they can’t easily do it because they are addicted. There’s plenty of help around for people who want to quit. Probably the best help of all is gentle support from other family members and friends.

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… from factories, cars and trucks

This is the pollution everybody sees and knows about. You can’t miss it, can you? Every time you go anywhere in a car or walk in the street, you smell the stink of exhaust fumes. Sometimes the exhaust fumes get so thick they form a sort of fog. People call this ‘smog’ (‘smoke’ + ‘fog’ = smog). It’s particularly bad in cities like Los Angeles, Mexico City, Beijing and Delhi. People get sick because of it. Why? Because the smoke, fumes and gases that make up the smog are poisonous. You might even be surprised to know that smoke from barbecues, grills (you know, restaurants and fast food places) and lawnmowers is also pretty bad and makes smogs even worse.

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What is the greenhouse effect?

What happens when you go into a greenhouse on a sunny day? It’s hot, isn’t it? That’s because the glass in the greenhouse traps the heat from the sun. This gas carbon dioxide acts like the greenhouse glass but in the Earth’s atmosphere – the air above us. Without any of it, we’d freeze. But too much of it means that we boil!

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Another thing you don’t see so easily which comes out of factories, farms and cities is the liquid pollution. This is the stuff that
gets
dumped
into streams,
into rivers,
into lakes and
into the seas.

Here’s the sort of stuff I mean:

• sewage (phew!)
• waste chemicals from factories
• waste oils from industry, cars, road run-off, service stations
• toxic heavy metals
  What are heavy metals? Two well known examples of heavy metals are mercury and cadmium. They are extremely toxic - even in tiny amounts
• spills and run-off from industrial farms (pesticides, manure slurry, fertilisers)
• blowout
  This is when the high-pressure gas and oil which the drillers want to tap overwhelms the blowout-preventer valves at the wellhead. It then blasts out into the air and often catches fire. One of the worst such accidents in recent time was the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, 2010
• oil from oil-drilling
• pollution from fracking
• dumping poisons in the river and killing the fish

I’m not saying people always do this dumping on purpose, although many do because it’s the ‘cheap’ option. Some of it is accidental and some because people don’t know any better. The ‘thinking’ (if any) goes like this:

” If I pour something nasty I want to get rid of into a river, that’s okay because it’s quickly flushed away by the flowing water… umm, isn’t it?”

Flushed away, yes, but where to? This is a huge problem for humans. Because people make so much waste, they have to dump it somewhere. Up to now, as long as no-one could see the waste (Not In My Back Yard, shortened to NIMBY), everyone thought it was okay. “Out of sight, out of mind.” The planet is only so big and people make so much mess that the whole planet gets dirty. The transport that the flowing rivers, tidal seas and ocean currents unintentionally provide for human pollution means that it really does get everywhere.

The same applies to the air which is why factories have big smoke stacks to dump smoke and fumes into the flowing wind. Then it blows away… but where to?

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This is all to do with how people make food: growing it on the farm, processing it in factories, storing it and making it ready for you to eat.

• • most farmers spray poisonous chemicals on their crops to kill off pests or diseases. Many of these poisons remain in small quantities in the food you eat. Some people believe that this may cause cancer and other illnesses. The poisons also pollute both water and air and can kill lots of animals by accident. They also kill a lot of humans by accident every year.
  • some farmers grow genetically engineered crops (see my guide about this). Some people regard GE crops as a form of pollution because once it’s released, nothing can bring it back again. You can clean up oil spills but you can’t clean up genetics spills. Genes are part of life and make living copies of themselves, sometimes millions of them. But, to be fair, there’s no evidence that GE foods are toxic or dangerous because people have been eating them without problem since the 1990s
    
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  • Each year, around 2.5 million tons (2,500,000 tons = 5 billion pounds) of pesticide are dumped on the planet’s crops. [2]
  • In 2002, an estimated 69,000 children were poisoned by pesticides in the US [3]
  • The World Health Organization reports 220,000 people die every year worldwide because of pesticide poisoning. Hard to believe, isn’t it? [2]
  • In 2019, the world pesticide market was estimated to be $32 billion ($81,000,000,000). Big bucks! [1]
  • Although most pesticides (80%) are used in the rich countries, most of the poisonings are in poor countries. This is because safety standards are poor, there may be no protective clothing or washing facilities, insufficient enforcement, poor labeling of pesticides which are used by farm workers who can’t read anyway. Few people know much about pesticide hazards. [2]
  • Pesticide residues in food are often higher in poor countries. [2]
  • Farmers who use pesticides have a ‘significantly higher rate of cancer incidence’ than non-farmers. [2]
  • In the US, nearly one in ten of about 3 billion kilograms (that’s 6,613,800,000 pounds) of toxic chemicals released per year is known to be capable of causing cancer (in other animals as well as people). [2]

  1. https://www.agprofessional.com/article/study-shows-global-pesticide-market-reach-81-billion-five-years; 2. Public health risks associated with pesticides and natural toxins in foods, David Pimentel et al., College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA; 3. US EPA fact sheet.

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  In Britain, a detailed study found some carrots on sale in shops with not twice, not four times, but 25 times the allowed pesticide residue (what’s left after harvest) in them. These organophosphate (OP) insecticides are highly dangerous nerve poisons. No one knows the long term effects of consuming low levels of OPs or any other substance, nor how they react with preservatives, colourings and stuff in the food you eat [1].
  More than 1 in 10 people who are regularly exposed to OP pesticides (like farmers) will suffer irreversible physical and mental damage [2].
  Many popular pesticides seem to damage the body’s ability to fight infection. They could be a hidden killer in poor countries where infections are a leading cause of death [2].

  Find out about all pesticide types at Extoxnet.
  Visit the PDP website for serious in-depth information about residues in food (database information in PDF format)

  1. Henry Doubleday Research Association News, Summer 1995, 1-2; 2. New Scientist, 21/2/98, 5; 3. Science News, 13/4/96, 149

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  • farm animals make lots of pollution from their waste. Some of this gets into water supplies and, because animals like cows belch and fart a lot of gas called methane, they add serious amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere which already has too much. This speeds up global warming because methane is a very strong greenhouse gas, much stronger than CO₂
  • trucks and aeroplanes used by people to move food and drink around make a lot of smoke and gas (like CO₂ and nitrogen oxides) pollutionprocessed food
  • much of what you eat and drink gets messed around with in big factories to make what is called ‘processed food’.
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  What happens when you go into a greenhouse on a sunny day? It’s hot, isn’t it? That’s because the glass in the greenhouse traps the heat from the sun. This gas carbon dioxide acts like the greenhouse glass but in the Earth’s atmosphere – the air above us. Without any of it, we’d freeze. But too much of it means that we boil!

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  Did you know?

  One cow belches out over 100 pounds (48 kilograms) of methane each year. Penguins aren’t so rude. What about you?

  New Scientist, 31/8/96, 5

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  Often things are put into food to make it look good but which might be harmful to people: additives, colour and other yukky stuff. Some food like meat often gets contaminated with nasty bugs called bacteria which can make people very sick or kill them.
  Most things that you drink — you know, things like soda — are really just flavoured water. Every drink you gulp down comes in a can or plastic bottles which you then throw away meaning waste and more transport. Sugary drinks make you fat and spoil your teeth. Some of the flavourings and sugar substitutes may be harmful. Nobody really knows for sure.

  Don’t worry though. You and your friends and parents really can help to cut this pollution. I’ve got some great ideas for you at the end of my guide

  

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You may have heard of some of these bugs…
E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria, Shigella and Campylobacter.
All are quite nasty and there are many others like them. They have three things in common: they are very small (you need a powerful microscope to see them); they make lots of copies of themselves very quickly; they are everywhere. You find E. coli in poorly cooked ham and other meats. It causes 20 000 cases of food poisoning and kills 200-500 people in the USA every year. The Salmonella bug turns up in as many as three quarters of all chickens. Campylobacter turns up in chickens too and also in raw milk [1]. Cholera used to cause huge epidemics and killed millions of people. You find it in contaminated seafood and water. Cholera still infects 5-7 million people and kills around 100,000 of those infected every year. The disease starts, almost always in poor countries, where the water supplies are not clean or people with no running water at all are forced to drink from polluted rivers.
Yet even in rich countries like the United States which has clean water, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reckon that foodborne diseases cause approximately 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths every year [1]. So don’t be surprised if you end up with a painful tummy if you slice up food you’re later going to eat raw with a knife you just used to cut up a contaminated piece of meat. This is called cross contamination. And lots of that clean-looking meat you buy in neat packs from the supermarket will contain these bacteria. ‘Clean-looking’ doesn’t mean ‘bug-free’!
But with just a little care, you can avoid trouble. In most cases, you can destroy these bugs by proper cooking and generally being clean in the kitchen including washing your hands before touching food. Kitchen dishcloths and sponges are often stuffed with bugs. They love it: warm, wet and with loads of old food to chomp up. Oddly enough, wooden chopping boards are much more bug-free than plastic ones [2].
The bottom line is to
drink water you know is clean and
eat food you know is fresh – and freshly prepared with clean knives and things
Find out more about the food poisoning bugs on the Union of Concerned Scientists’ website.

1. Food-Related Illness and Death in the United States, CDC (2003)
2. Science News, 14/9/96, 172-3

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Anyway, millions of people died in wars in the 20th century alone. Quite apart from all the death and suffering, wars also create terrible pollution. Military aircraft use huge amounts of fuel. If an aeroplane (pollution) drops a bomb (more pollution) on an oil refinery, a huge fire starts (yet more pollution).

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On 6 and 9 August 1945, the US Air Force dropped two huge bombs on two Japanese cities. The first city was called Hiroshima and the second Nagasaki. These were the first atomic bombs and – so far – the only ones that have ever been used in war. By 1950 those two bombs and the radiation from them had killed 350,000 people. By today’s standards, those two bombs were very small. Hydrogen bombs are hundreds of times more powerful and the nuclear-armed states (the USA, France, Russia, China, Britain, Israel and, now, India and Pakistan) have thousands of them. I wish people would unite and make governments give up nuclear weapons.

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What is radiation?

Radiation is scary because no one can tell it’s there without special detectors. Animals like you and me have senses which means we can see, hear, touch, taste, smell — but we can’t tell if something is radioactive (gives off radiation). Waste products from making nuclear bombs and from nuclear power plants are very radioactive indeed. If you happened to fall into a nuclear reactor, you would die almost instantly. Lower radiation levels can also make people die — over a matter of days or, by causing illnesses like cancer, over a period of years.

Radiation comes from new elements (uranium fuel is an element; so is carbon and so is oxygen) which get made during nuclear reactions. These elements, called isotopes, often only exist for a few weeks or years. But some last for hundreds of thousands of years which is why no one really knows what to do about getting rid of them. Isotopes have something called a ‘half-life’. One dangerous one which got spewed out from the wrecked Chernobyl reactor was an iodine isotope. This has a half-life of 8 days which means that if you start with a chunk the size of a can of beans, in 8 days its size will have halved; a half can of beans. Eight more days later and you have one quarter of what you started with… and so on. Where does all that missing stuff go? That’s the nasty bit: the radiation. And it’s dangerous to life like you and me because it’s made of tiny particles which travel very fast. So if you stand near something radioactive, you’re being hit by trillions of tiny ‘bullets’ all the time. You can’t feel it but these ‘bullets’ damage the cells in your body. A lot of damage breaks them and you die. Less damage messes up their genes and causes cancer and kills you slowly. Like I said, nasty stuff.

nuclear bombs make radiation for years after

A few years ago, some people called hippies used to say ‘make love, not war’. Sadly, many people seem to prefer to make war, not love.

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The best known nasties are persistent organic pollutants POPs. These include the pesticides farmers spray on food crops. POPs are very stable. They don’t go away. Almost no life can break them down and make them harmless. Instead they tend to build up inside animals’ bodies.  This can mean they can’t have babies or it can make them ill or even kill them.

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POPs

Persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, are toxic (poisonous) though nobody realised this when they were first made. They cause cancer, birth defects and other damage to animals’ and people’s bodies.

The 12 worst of these POPs , nicknamed the “dirty dozen”, were banned in May 2004 but they are very stable and take many years to disappear. Because of their stability, they get spread all around the world via the atmosphere and oceans. Many end up in the Arctic, far from their source, and are bad news for the Inuit peoples and polar bears because POPs ‘bioaccumulate’ (or ‘biomagnify’) in both plants and animals. This is critical for meat-eating animals at the top of the food chain like people and polar bears. POPs become concentrated in animals’ body fat so if a person eats meat from an animal like a fish which has ‘bioaccumulated’ POPs from its own food, the chemicals become concentrated and can reach up to 70,000 times the levels you would find in the environment.

Before human industry, there were no POPs anywhere. They are not natural chemicals. But some POPs are useful to industry which is why they are made

• because some can be used to kill crop pests like insects
• because they are needed in many industry products (e.g PCBs )

Unfortunately some POPs form because of the burning of trash containing plastics at waste tips and incinerators. Dioxins are the best known ‘nasty’ which get unintentionally made when PVC plastic burns).

For more on POPs, including the “dirty dozen” worst offenders, visit the US EPA website.

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Perhaps you’ve also heard of CFCs? These chemicals are not toxic but they do damage the atmosphere. They destroy a gas called ozone which shields the planet from the strong radiation of the sun. People sensibly agreed to stop making them at a meetings which came up with an international agreement called the Montreal Protocol. As a result, the ‘hole’ in the ozone shield over my home, the Antarctic, seems to have stopped getting bigger. Another hole forms over the Arctic for the same reasons. So on the whole, the Montreal Protocol has been a success but there are still some problems.

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A pesticide called methyl bromide is damaging the Earth’s protective shield of ozone. Farmers use this pesticide to kill tiny worms called nematodes, bugs and weeds that can affect strawberries, tomatoes and flowers. It is now the third most important cause of ozone destruction, after CFCs and halons. Its use has doubled in six years [1]  and there’s a campaign to convince US supermarkets to stop selling food grown or treated with methyl bromide.
But there is an alternative: methyl iodide which is no threat to the ozone shield [2]. Why aren’t farmers using this instead? More information on methyl bromide.

[1] New Scientist, 11/12/99, 7; [2] New Scientist, 20/7/96, 9

People now belong to what they call the ‘throwaway society‘. Much of what you buy quickly becomes waste – and you just throw it away. This waste means whole armies of trucks collecting and taking it away in all cities everywhere.

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Everything humans make eventually becomes junk. Most of it is junk within hours of you buying it. Think of all the throwaway plastic bottles, paper cups and plates from that fast food meal you had last night. The cup might once have been part of a tree in which birds sang and under which bears roamed. Plastic is made using energy from oil. Sometime soon, the trees and the oil will run out unless people mend their ways. And plastic trash is fast becoming a serious pollution issue. Even big things like buildings, ships and bridges eventually become junk.

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People are so funny. They’re embarrassed about ‘bodily functions’ so there are lots of cute or coy ways of talking about places for getting rid of the body’s waste products; names like ladies, gents, mens’ room, little girls’ room, powder room, public conveniences, the john, heads, the bog, the loo. I’m sure there are many more. But they all mean one thing: a place to get rid of rather smelly waste. Dumped, flushed — out of sight, out of mind. Phew!

But in nature, there’s no such thing as waste. The stuff people flush down toilets could all be used as fertiliser for growing food. But mostly, it just gets thrown away into rivers, lakes and the sea, making more pollution.

What amazes me is that people throw most of this natural plant fertiliser away and then spend vast amounts making artificial fertilisers. Places like Nauru Island have been destroyed by phosphate fertiliser mining. And artificial nitrogen fertilisers need energy on a vast scale. The energy comes from fossil fuels… which then pollute the atmosphere and cause climate change.

So people pay twice: first, to throw away body ‘wastes’. Then they pay again to make fertiliser by using stuff which will run out in a few years. Crazy, isn’t it?

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Some waste gets recycled (used again), but most ends up in garbage dumps so huge they’re like mountains.

To work out how much waste your family makes, click here! What a waste!
From my viewpoint, people are really wasting their ‘waste’.
When it comes to using stuff taken from the planet, humans think in straight lines:

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Waste time!

Most people have no real idea how much waste they make every year. Have you? If the answer is ‘no’, you can use this simple but rather messy way to find out. It’s called a waste audit. The ideal (but impossible) aim is to end up as close to zero as you can for stuff which can’t be recycled. IDEA: Get your friends to do this too. You might even have a competition for the least wasteful family.

Okay, so let’s begin our audit…

1. Gather together all the garbage you and your family produce in one week. Better tell your mum or dad what you want to do and maybe they’ll help. It’s a good idea to wear rubber gloves when you handle garbage since it can be a little yukky!
2. Weigh it (maybe your family has a spring balance? or ask if you can use the bathroom scales?) and write down the total.
3. Work out the volume of the waste. That’s easy if it’s in bags because you can assume each bag is a ball (sphere). You can calculate the volume by first measuring the radius of the ball of trash. Then, if you like math, you can calculate the volume. Or, if you don’t like maths, get an online sphere volume calculator to do it for you!
4. Add up all your weights and then all your volumes (if you had several bags). Then, multiply your weights and your volume results by 52. Then you know how much waste you produce in one year. It will probably surprise you.
5. Sort through the waste and see how much of it you can recycle. It’s usually possible to recycle glass, newspaper, paper, aluminium and steel cans, aluminium foil, batteries, clothes and plastic bottles. You can personally recycle garden rubbish, some untreated paper and cardboard and most kitchen wastes by making compost in your backyard (if you have one). Again, if you want, you can work out weights and volumes by packing different sorts of stuff in separate bags for weighing and measuring. Then you’ll finally find out just how much of your garbage is made up of packaging.

But just a minute. Isn’t there something missing from all this waste? Can you guess?

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Start >> Grab >> Make >> Use >> Trash >> Finish

Grab is mining minerals, soils, forests and fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal). These are resources. mining is taking something out and not replacing it. Make is producing stuff for people to buy: industry. Use is what people do with what they buy, like driving. Trash is what happens when the stuff is old, unwanted, broken, burned (as in fuels and garbage) or outdated.

GMUT for short.

Result?

Fewer resources, growing trash piles and pollution on a grand scale affecting the whole planet: seas, rivers, lakes, lands, air.

Recycling is natural. Every other system on our planet runs in circles – cycles. There’s no such thing as trash; no pollution. There’s no start and no finish. Everything is constantly being recycled – naturally. One creature’s waste becomes another’s food. Humans and their industries are the odd animals who don’t fit in to the way the planet’s systems work. But people are learning. More and more stuff now gets recycled. Great! But wait. What about the sky above us, space, the moon and asteroids? It’s hard to believe but people already planning to mine the moon and asteroids. Satellites in low Earth orbits now total over 800 – and then there is space junk.

• noise – almost everyone hears noise made by people and their machines all the time. How many things that make noise can you think of? Perhaps you like noise. Some people are scared of silence.
• mess – things people have made. What can you think of that’s ugly – eyesores? Industrial things? Roads? Waste tips?
• a new sort of pollution is here: it is often called “fake news” which is lies. Often it is aimed at kids. Very soon, I shall have a guide for you about the growing problem of conspiracy theories and how you can tell what is true and what isn’t
• anything else?

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• Tell your family, tell your friends. Talk about it with your teachers at school. Get active; join Greta Thunberg
  What is the point of learning stuff in school if you have no future because of climate change chaos which is already starting. Today's adults should be dealing with this now, but are doing nothing, she argues.
  in her Fridays for Future
• find out more. You could start with my links section (click the link at the bottom of this page). Remember that not everything you see, read or hear will be the truth. The people who are making a lot of money out of pollution don’t want you to find out the truth. They don’t want to be stopped
• join a group who are trying to stop pollution Again, see my links section
• recycle as much ‘waste’ as you can. Or don’t buy stuff which becomes waste (like packaging from takeaway food). You can use real plates made of china and forks made of steel thousands of times. Plastic plates and cutlery last once and then become waste
• if you want to go somewhere, try and walk or use a bicycle. Cars are big polluters
• see if you can buy food which has been grown locally. Is there a local farm shop? Some farmers deliver vegetables and other foods. Buying local foods means almost no transport is needed
• some shops and supermarkets will deliver things to your home. You can even shop online. This means your family doesn’t need to drive to pick up your food. One supermarket truck or pickup can deliver stuff to dozens of families… saving dozens of car journeys. Think about it
• if you can, try and get organic food. Organic food does not contain any kind of pesticide or use chemicals that harm the land, air or water. Animals raised in organic farms are treated more kindly than in factory farms
• try and avoid processed food and drink. Use fresh food whenever you can and don’t eat out so much. Cooking can be fun, you know! Have you ever tried it? Barbecues are fun but they make a lot of smoke pollution, so keep them for really special occasions
• grow your own vegetables. Believe it or not, this can be fun too! You don’t need much space. You can even grow things in pots on the window ledge or in a sunny spot inside
• if you have space, make compost from waste food (vegetable peelings and so on). Worms eat all this rotting stuff and make it into a sort of rich soil, very good for plants
• don’t buy things that you don’t need or that you end up throwing away in a couple of weeks

And now, how about tackling my Pollution quiz? Or take a look at my choices of the best videos on pollution

C’mon kids, send me your ideas!!

What do you think about pollution? Have you any good ideas this about what we can do to make things better? If you do, please write to me and I’ll add your idea to my Kids Ideas to Stop Pollution page so that other kids can see too. So get thinking, get writing and get active. And yes, you can send me short videos or photos you’ve taken if they help explain your idea and I’ll post them on the same page. C’mon kids, what are you waiting for???!
A class of kids from Sudan (Africa) has started the ball rolling (June 2015) with their Pollution Solutions video.
Did you find my pollution guide useful? If you did, please tell your friends about it. Thank you and good luck with fixing the pollution problem!

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School kids making a fuss

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you are not alone!

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Telling lies about organic food: vested interests

If you believed some of the stuff you read, you might even think that organic food could ‘seriously damage your health’. In 1999, just such claims were made in the USA. Organic food, they said, was ’30 times more likely to poison you’ than ordinary food. It could even kill you!

Almost immediately, these claims were stamped on by the US Government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from which the evidence was supposed to have come. Robert Tauxe, head of the CDC’s food-borne diseases branch, simply pointed out that no such information exists and that the claims were ‘absolutely not true’. So that, you’d think, would be the end of that. Not so. The claims continued to be reported in the press in both the US and Britain despite the CDC’s trashing of them.

Why, you might ask? Well it just happens that the original claims were made by a US ‘think tank’ called the Hudson Institute whose director is ‘a vitriolic opponent of organic agriculture’. This ‘think tank’ supports industrial agriculture – the system which has caused so much pollution.[1]

The message is clear, don’t you think? Question everything you read or see or hear. Some information may be lies but is presented as the truth. Most of the Media are owned and controlled by giant corporations whose main interest is in making money. And the people who continued to report this organic food scare nonsense obviously had not checked their facts. Or maybe they, or their media’s owners, had reasons for hating organic agriculture too. I could guess at some but why not think about that yourself?

claims have been made that organic produce is more likely to be contaminated by fungal poisons called mycotoxins. Again, there is no evidence for these claims.[2]

Anyway, I’m sure you’re sensible enough not to believe all the claims made by advertisers that you see on TV. Likewise with the ‘media’, seeing should not be believing. Beware! Always ask questions.

Imagine a ‘scientific’ report which claims that eating junk food is good for you. You question it and find out who wrote it and whoops it turns out to have been written by a junk food manufacturer. Well they would say that wouldn’t they?

This questioning approach – not believing anything until you have good reason – is called ‘being sceptical’. It’s a fine basis for life in this polluted industrial world you humans have made for yourselves in which money is king. In my world, we’re all kings – king penguins that is… !

And, if you’re at school, why not make gullibility (how people get taken in by half-truths and false information) a topic to discuss in your class?

A lot of ‘educational material’ (books, leaflets and stuff) you find in junior schools also turns out to have been produced by companies who want you to buy their product. They tell you how healthy it is to eat or drink something which they happen to sell. They might be right but it is really clever (subtle) advertising dressed up as learning.
1. Information from a report by Lawrence Woodward, director of Elm Farm Research Centre, UK (from The Organic Way[(Henry Doubleday Research Association magazine], Winter 1999, 35).
2. “Corporate propaganda against organic produce”, Institute for Science and Society, 23/11/04.

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