Essay on Environmental Management: Water Pollution and Drinking Water

This essay delves into the critical aspects of environmental management, focusing on water pollution, drinking water treatment, and related management processes. It explores the impact of soil erosion on water quality, leading to sedimentation, increased turbidity, and issues for aquatic plants. The essay also addresses eutrophication, where excessive nutrients cause algal blooms and oxygen depletion, affecting aquatic life. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of dissolved oxygen in wastewater discharge and the effects of drinking water sources and groundwater pollution. The essay further discusses municipal drinking water processes for both groundwater and surface water, emphasizing the need for water treatment to enhance water quality for various end-uses, including drinking and irrigation. The essay concludes by outlining physical, chemical, and biological processes like filtration, coagulation, and disinfection used to remove water contaminants and manage water pollution effectively.

Running Head: ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT
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Environmental Management
Water Pollution and Treatment
(Student Details: )
12/15/2019

ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT
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Environmental Management
The essay is based on environmental management in the context of water pollution,
drinking water treatment, and management processes. With the help of this essay, one will
get familiar with drinking water sources, water pollution, as well as drinking water treatment
processes. As we know, various environmental technologies are getting utilised these days for
the purpose of water management for healthy well-being (Heath, 2018).
In this context, it has been observed that soil erosion has impacted water quality to a
large extent. Due to sedimentation water quality gets affected by soil erosion. Here, sediment
deposition within rivers and lakes enhances water turbidity while making it difficult for the
light to penetrate the water (Lu et. al., 2015). In this way, it causes issues for aquatic plants
which require a big amount of sunlight for photosynthesis. In addition to that these sediments
are rich in nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous. Subsequently, the nutrients increase the
excessive growth of algae. In this way, this whole process is known as eutrophication
(Schwarzenbach et. al., 2010). It can be said that within the areas of algae growth, oxygen
depletion occurs and hence polluted water causes the death of aquatic animals. This drastic
incident occurs because of a lack of oxygen (Heath, 2018).
Apart from this, the dissolved oxygen profile downstream of a wastewater discharge
matters a lot in case of water pollution (Lu et. al., 2015). In general, stream system both
generates and consumes oxygen. Hence, this stream system acquires oxygen from the
environment as well as from plants as an outcome of photosynthesis. In this way, wastewater
from sewage treatment plants usually includes organic materials that are decomposed by
many microorganisms those utilise oxygen in the water management process. Apart from
this, processes like drinking water sources, eutrophication of lakes, sources of groundwater
pollution also affect water management processes (Lu et. al., 2015). It is worth knowing that
eutrophication refers to the process where lakes acquire nutrients like nitrogen and
phosphorus as well as sediment through the watershed surroundings. These extra nutrients
cause additional plant growth, algal blooms and thereby overall poor water quality (Feenberg,
2012). Thus, eutrophication of lakes makes the lake less appropriate for recreation.
Furthermore, there can be a number of ways that can be used for typical municipal drinking
water processes for groundwater and surface water sources. Therefore, water treatment can be
used as a process that enhances the quality of water while making it more acceptable for the

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particular end-use. Here, the end-use can be denoted by irrigation, drinking, industrial water
supply, water recreation and river flow maintenance while also including being safely
returned to the earth’s environment (Heath, 2018).
In whole, water treatment is necessary so that global people can be lived and grow
efficiently and effectively. This discussion has found that various processes can be used for
removing water contaminants. These processes may include physical, chemical and
biological processes. Thus, with the help of identified processes like filtration, settling,
coagulation, slow sand filtration and disinfection can be applied for water treatment and
hence removing water pollution worldwide.

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References
Feenberg, D. (2012). Measuring the benefits of water pollution abatement. UK: Elsevier.
Heath, A. G. (2018). Water pollution and fish physiology. New York: CRC press.
Lu, Y., Song, S., Wang, R., Liu, Z., Meng, J., Sweetman, A. J., & Wang, T. (2015). Impacts
of soil and water pollution on food safety and health risks in China. Environment
international, 77, 5-15.
Schwarzenbach, R. P., Egli, T., Hofstetter, T. B., Von Gunten, U., & Wehrli, B. (2010).
Global water pollution and human health. Annual Review of Environment and
Resources, 35, 109-136.