> What is the total volume of man's pollution per year?

What is the total volume of man's pollution per year?

Posted at: 2015-03-12 
Nobody actually knows because statistics are usually kept for quite limited and different purposes and pollution is a lot trickier to define than you'd think. A pollutant is a substance or energy introduced into the environment that has undesired effects.

A hilarious bit in an old Jacques Cousteau documentary was when they came to a nuclear power plant in Spain that was dumping its waste heat directly into the Mediterranean Sea. Aha! Irresponsible environmental pollution at its worst…only the Sea Life loved it! It made the natural coastline look like a lifeless wasteland by comparison. The Cousteau group was nearly ready to explode that they couldn't find anything to criticize.

If an animal poops in the woods (or anywhere), is that pollution or part of the nutrient cycle? Actually it's both, because its part of how parasites, including disease pathogens, spread to other animals.

Carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels is not entirely pollution even to Man Made Global Warming supporters. Carbon dioxide is a plant fertilizer so only the part that the biosphere can't absorb is a pollutant in their opinion.

Eutrophication could be called "too much of a good thing" pollution. A very large part man's pollutants wouldn't be pollutants were they spread wider or better placed so the biosphere could make use of them.

There are natural oil spills (natural underwater leakages from geological petroleum deposits) that have an array of marine lifeforms eating the oil as their evolved natural means of survival. If man pumps the oil out so it no longer spills into the sea, is that a form of pollution when those marine lifeforms die out?

EDIT: Just out of curiosity, why the thumbs down? I fail to see the objectionable part of my answer. Or have I "arrived" in notoriety where by name recognition alone my statements are outcast, taboo and verboten? (If so, thanks.)

you need to be more specific. does flushing a toilet into a lake make the whole volume of water polluted?

same with atmosphere. we can still breathe although there are some days in Beijing,China when the air is very polluted.

the amount of co2 added to the atmosphere every year is eady to calculate although numbers are reported in tonnes, not volume.

Asking about the "volume" is a bit strange when it comes to gases, since they expand to fill up the volume available.

Seven billion!