Question: Will humans be able to stop river and sea pollution and how?

Hayley Evers-King answered on 12 Mar 2013:

We’ve made a lot of progress in reducing river and sea pollution in a lot of places around the world. Where there is strong laws in place, this has helped make the water much cleaner. The problems come when some places don’t have these laws (like the coasts of certain countries and a lot of the open, deep oceans), here people can dump whatever they like and that pollution can be spread around the world by the way the oceans move. I’m not sure we’d ever be able to totally stop pollution – we still need to transport things by ships and things like sewerage waste have to go somewhere, but I think we can make a lot of progress by using international laws to discourage companies and people from polluting, making them clean up mess in case of accidents (like oil spills) and monitoring water quality.