Okay, now I’ve heard and seen enough. My hostel canteen has stopped ordering soft drinks. WTF?! I mean this is the limit.
You must be wondering - What’s wrong with this guy?! It’s good for his health. No more chilled pesticides and fertilizers.
Well that’s what I would’ve thought if it hadn’t been for the Environmental Engineering course that I’m doing this semester.
Let me start from the very beginning.
*Most important environmental media are - Water and Air.** Why not soil? Because our average contact with soil is much less that our contact with water and air. So water and air pollution affects us the most.
Now, how does one define pollution? Well every environmental media has some impurities. But not all impurities are pollutants. **Only those impurities which are above certain concentration in the media, become detrimental to our health and are called pollutants.** For example, Carbon Dioxide in air is necessary for ecological balance(plants breathe it) but too much carbon dioxide is bad for health.
Okay, now with the basics all laid out - let me emphasize the point that no *natural* water exists which is free of impurities. Even the water which you get after filtering from Aquaguard will have some microbes and(hopefully very less) chemical compounds.
Modern agriculture is heavily dependent on the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Pesticides are(usually) highly toxic chemical compounds which are mixed in water and sprayed on the crop. These compounds do kill all the insects - but after they’ve done their job - they just sit there. On the leaves of the plant. On the soil. Either the plant absorbs them(through the roots or leaves) or they seep into our ground water.
The unfortunate thing about these compounds is that they are not biodegradable. This means - no natural organism can break down these toxic compounds. So they just enter our environmental media - and stay there - for years and years to come. With more and more usage of these compounds their concentration in the environmental media slowly keeps increasing.
*Virtually every source of water in our country has high concentrations of various pesticides and fertilizers, ** with about 50 years of continuous usage of these compounds.
What can Coke and Pepsi do about it? Take water from anywhere and you’re drinking some amount of pesticide. Even if they somehow remove the pesticide from there - do you think you’ll be safe. How many glasses of tap water do you drink in a day? Compare that with the number of soft-drinks you consume in one day.
The problem is of the government. **I was shocked to know that DDT is not banned in India.** It’s been long since it’s been banned in the USA. And still the DDT concentration in the soil over there has not gone down. We are still using it?! Stringent norms for potable(drinking) water have not been laid down by the government. Whatever norms are there are for bottled water and soft drinks. And chew on this - they are different!? Duh? I mean, both of them use water - and both of them are consumed by humans. How can you allow one to have more pesticides than the other. And the icing on the cake - **No norms for drinking water supplied by the municipal corporations exist!*
So, do you still think that not drinking Coke/Pepsi would make any significant effect?!
Nandz.
PS: I wish I could explain this to my canteen *wallah.