Who are the biggest polluters of water in the US?

Question

My guess---FARMERS.

Answer 1

My guess, people's lawns. Farmers are in the business of making money and they don't make any money from putting fertilizer in the streams. They also just happen to provide a useful product. People who want the greenest lawn in town produce no useful product and don't care how much fertilizer they use to get the lawn lush. As a result, the first rain washes nitrogen and phosphorus into the street, to the storm sewer, which dump into the creek. Pesticides applied don't help any either.

Answer 2

I would agree with you, farmers, and also giant feed lots - uck.

Answer 3

Dupont is extremely bad about polluting a cities water. I used to live in Washington, WV where the only tefcell Dupont plant in the world is. Washington, WV was the only place that would except the plant. They take r-12 freon and separate it into two chemicals. One is teflon, which is on our skillets and the other is formaldehyde, which they put in dead bodies. Anyway the pollute the rivers with their nasty chemical waste.

Answer 4

I have this extremely heavy obese friend who when he uses the toilet certainly comes close to be the biggest polluter of water in the US

Answer 5

the government dumping treated sewage into rivers and the ocean.

http://www.nrdc.org/water/pollution/sewa...

http://www.sierraclub.org/planet/200604/...

http://www.bu.edu/sjmag/scimag2005/featu...

http://www.cpcb.nic.in/oldwebsite/sewage...

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cp...

http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2005/...

http://www.cdnn.info/news/eco/e060416.ht...

http://www.nativefishsociety.org/documen...

http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/Po-Re/P...

Answer 6

i say mechanic because the oil they waste they probably put it down the drain

Answer 7

Everyone is a big polluter of water. We throw trash, we contaminate the water with pesticides, and oil. Everything.

Answer 8

oskana - can you say overacheiver.

Answer 9

The nation's biggest polluter isn't a corporation. It's the Pentagon. Every year the Department of Defense churns out more than 750,000 tons of hazardous waste -- more than the top three chemical companies combined.

Yet the military remains largely exempt from compliance with most federal and state environmental laws, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Pentagon's partner in crime, is working hard to keep it that way.

For the past five decades the federal government, defense contractors and the chemical industry have joined forces to block public health protections against perchlorate, a component of rocket fuel that has been shown to effect children's growth and mental progress by disrupting the function of the thyroid gland which regulates brain development.

Perchlorate has been leaking from literally hundreds of defense plants and military installations across the country. The EPA has reported that perchlorate is present in drinking and groundwater supplies in 35 states. Center for Disease Control and independent studies have also overwhelmingly shown that perchlorate is existent in our food supplies, cow's milk, and human breast milk. As a result virtually every American has some level of perchlorate in their body.

Currently only two states, California and Massachusetts, have set a maximum allowable contaminant level for perchlorate in drinking water. But the EPA won't follow these states' lead. In the Colorado River, which provides water for over 20 million people, perchlorate levels are high. The chemical is most prevalent in the Southwest and California as a result of the large number of military operations and defense contractors in the region.

In 2001 the EPA estimated that the total liability for the cleanup of toxic military sites would exceed $350 billion, or five times the Superfund Act liability of private industry. But the federal government has been complacent and allowed perchlorate to run rampant throughout our water supplies. This negligence and lack of regulatory oversight has left the Pentagon, NASA and defense contractors free to set their own levels, trimming the high, but necessary costs of restoring groundwater quality.

While the situation has become dire in recent years, it was the Clinton administration that didn't do nearly enough to begin cleaning up these sites and certainly did not keep a close eye on how the Pentagon spent the money it received. During the 1990s the Defense Department spent only $3.5 billion a year cleaning up toxic military sites -- much of that on studies, not actual work. In 1998, the Defense Science Review Board, a federal advisory committee set up to provide independent advice to the secretary of defense, looked at the problem and concluded that the Pentagon had no clear environmental cleanup policy, goals or program, which led lawyer Jonathan Turley, who holds the Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law at George Washington University, to call the Pentagon the nation's "premier environmental villain."

"If they can spend $1 million on a cruise missile, it seems kind of ridiculous they won't spend $200,000 to see if our food is contaminated with rocket fuel," says Renee Sharp, a scientist with Environmental Working Group. But if the Clinton program was chintzy, the Bush plan has been downright penurious.