I’ve been looking in dictionaries, encyclopedias, and apart from the fact that pollution is more commonly used for the environment, i can’t seem to find a real difference. Any ideas?
Ask George W.
“It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.”
Seriously, I don’t think there is a real difference. One of the great things about the English language is that there is almost always a synonym, so you can use whichever word sounds best in the context.
Obviously, there are some cases in which you would use “contamination” rather than “pollution” or vice versa, eg food is contaminated, but the lake air is polluted. But that’s not a hard and fast rule…
I thought that quote was from Dan Quayle. Anyway, damn the english language. Damn it to hell
Normally, contamination is used for (1) microbial contamination or (2) chemical contamination of food, drinking water, or air systems. Pollution is usually used with reference to the environment: wells, lakes, the atmosphere, etc. Some writers use “pollution” to describe a process by which something becomes entirely fouled or unfit for use, reserving “contamination” for mere contact with or intrusion by a contaminant.
Pollution is a more general catch-all word, usually for larger areas or outdoor systems like a lake, that old dump site where people threw all their garbage out in the woods, the Nile river, the old dirt parking lot behind a large mechanic’s shop, Toronto’s air, and so on. As I’ve heard it used it usually doesn’t make reference specifically to a particular contaminant or chemical, but rather just “a bunch of nasty stuff that makes it dirty and shouldn’t be there”.
Contamination can be used more specifically by including what thing or things it’s contaminated with; eg lead contamination, pcbs, microbial contamination, etc… And it doesn’t necesarilly mean quite the same - if I stick an unwashed pipette into a stock solution bottle to do whatever, I now have contaminated stock, which according to common chemical lab proceedures is now no good and must be discarded due to the fact that it’s no longer “pure”. I can also have contaminated glassware with one tiney spec of chemical on the side… but you don’t hear chemists saying our 0.1 N NaOH or my 100ml volumetric flask is polluted.
So for example most any river flowing through heavily populated areas of thrid world countries will be polluted from all the crap that gets thrown into it, whereas the drinking water in Walkerton was contaminated with a certain lovel of E.coli that killed some people and made more sick.