Land pollution




Mining is a major cause of land pollution. It's easy to point the finger at mine operators, but we all rely on fuels, metals, and other minerals that come from the ground, so we're all partly responsible for the damage that mining does

What is land pollution?

pollution can be defined generally along these lines: it's the introduction into the environment of substances that don't normally belong there, which, in great enough concentrations, can have harmful effects on plants, animals, and humans. We can define land pollution either narrowly or broadly. Narrowly defined, it's another term for soil contamination (for example, by factory chemicals or sewage and other wastewater)

To include garbage and industrial waste, agricultural pesticides and fertilizers, impacts from mining and other forms of industry, the unwanted consequences of urbanization, and the systematic destruction of soil through over-intensive agriculture; we'll take land pollution to mean any kind of long-term land damage, destruction, degradation, or loss.

Causes of land pollution

Waste disposal

Humans produce vast quantities of waste—in factories and offices, in our homes and schools, and in such unlikely places as hospitals. Even the most sophisticated waste processing plants, which use plasma torches (electrically controlled "flames" at temperatures of thousands of degrees) to turn waste into gas, produce solid waste products that have to be disposed of somehow. There's simply no getting away from waste: our ultimate fate as humans is to die and become waste products that have to be burned or buried!

Mining



Although there are many responsible mining companies, and environmental laws now tightly restrict mining in some countries, mines remain among the most obvious scars on (and under) the landscape. Surface mining (sometimes called quarrying or opencast mining) requires the removal of topsoil (the fertile layer of soil and organic matter that is particularly valuable for agriculture) to get at the valuable rocks below. Even if the destruction of topsoil is the worst that happens, it can turn a productive landscape into a barren one, which is a kind of pollution
Most metals occur in rocky mixtures called ores, from which the valuable elements have to be extracted by chemical, electrical, or other processes. That leaves behind waste products and the chemicals used to process them, which historically were simply dumped back on the land. Since all the waste was left in one place, the concentration of pollution 

Urbanization

Humans have been making permanent settlements most of the cities and towns we've created, and the infrastructure that keeps them running, will remain Not many of us would automatically classify cities and other human settlements as "land pollution"; people obviously need to live and work somewhere. Even so, urbanization marks a hugely important change to the landscape that can cause land pollution in a variety of subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

Agricultural chemicals


Feeding the world on such a scale is only possible because agriculture now works in an industrial way, with giant machines such as tractors and combine harvesters doing the work that hundreds of people would have done in the past, and chemicals such as fertilizers and pesticides (herbicides that kill weeds and insecticides that kill bugs) increasing the amount of food that can be grown on each piece of land. Unfortunately, most pesticides are by definition poisons, and many remain in the soil or accumulate there for years. One infamous and now widely banned pesticide,

Atmospheric deposition

Air pollution doesn't remain air pollution forever. Ideally it disperses, so the concentration of problematic chemicals becomes so low that it no longer constitutes pollution. Sometimes, though, it falls back to the ground and becomes either water pollution (if it enters the oceans, rivers, and lakes) or land pollution. Pollution created ("deposited") in water or land from existing pollution in the air (atmosphere) is known as atmospheric deposition.

Effects of land pollution

Right atmospheric conditions, air and water pollution disperse and disappear. What makes land pollution such a problem is that land is static, so land pollution stays exactly where it is until and unless someone cleans it up. Land that's polluted stays polluted; land that's urbanized almost invariably stays urbanized. 

The simplest effect of land pollution is that it takes land out of circulation. The more land we use up, the less we have remaining. That might not sound a problem where there's plenty of land in rural areas, but it's certainly a concern where productive agricultural land is concerned, especially as the world's population continues to increase. The biggest problem comes when contaminated land is returned to use, either as building or agricultural land. Houses might be built on brownfield (former industrial) sites.

Solutions

 Ideally, we'd look at every aspect of land pollution in turn and try to find a way of either stopping it or reducing it. With problems like waste disposal, solutions are relatively simple. We know that recycling that can dramatically reduce the need for sending waste to landfills; it also reduces the need for incineration, which can produce "fly ash" (toxic airborne dust) that blows may miles until it falls back to land or water. We'll always need mines but, again, recycling of old materials can reduce our need for new ones. In some countries, it's now commonplace to require mine operators to clean-up mines and restore the landscape after they've finished working them;